


An Act of Faith Against the Night

by Cluegirl



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Open Relationships, PTSD, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:06:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4383908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Steve finally winds up back in DC, Tony meets him at his new condominium with a housewarming gift, a job offer, and a proposition.  But as usual when Tony Stark's involved, things can't stay that simple for long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Long Range Donuts

** Steve **

"Oh, so you _do_ still own this phone."

Still dazed and more than half asleep, Steve pulled the phone away from his ear with a grimace. "What the... Stark - um, Tony?"

"I was starting to wonder when you went like six million years without picking up," he breezed on with barely a pause. "But lucky for you, I'm a patient man."

"Yeah. Can't believe my good fortune," Steve deadpanned, scrubbing at his face. "What time is it?"

"He asked as if it mattered," Tony came back at him, but a real current of pleasure ran through his manic, too-bright cheer, something guileless, genuine and unforced as very few pleasantries had been since the Helicarrier crash. "Focus, Cap -- you were the one who picked up the call at two a.m. and after all this time of stonewalling me and everyone in the world, that's a significant statistical anomaly. So what's up?"

"I..." a yawn cracked through Steve's words, and he had to start again. "I been busy. Lost my phone-"

"Lost like 'left it on the train' or lost like 'ditched it when you went on the run from HYDRA?" Tony asked, just the finest glimmer of an edge showing through his cheer.

"Something like that," Steve agreed without bothering to clarify. "Just got time to replace it now. And I wouldn't 'a picked up, only I thought you were Natasha."

A bark of laughter. "Well, I can honestly say that being mistaken for the most deadly woman alive has never happened to me before; the facial hair and lack of tits usually clues most people in. So, you gonna let me come up, or what?"

Steve sat up straighter, suddenly and fully awake. "What?"

"I mean it's not like hacking the security door down here would be _difficult_ or anything, but Pepper's assured me that kind of thing is impolite, and I hear that politeness is supposed to be a Thing, sooo."

"You're at my apartment?" He lurched out of bed, grabbing for his pants.

"Well that'd be pretty stupid of me, given that the movers just cleared your apartment out this morning, wouldn't it?" Stark asked, sounding smugly proud of himself, and just a touch worried. "I'm outside your new condo. And I brought doughnuts."

"Aw Jeez, Tony, a little warning woulda been nice," Steve groused, trying to jam his feet into shoes while bolting for the door at top speed.

"Yeah, well you picking up your phone before you burned SHIELD down and went walkabout for six months woulda been nice too, but here we are," Tony shot back, just as if he had any room to talk after that fiasco with the Mandarin at Christmas. "Now buzz me in, will ya? I think your scary cyber-doorman's gonna try and kick my ass in a minute."

Steve froze for precisely one-tenth of a second. Then he hit the door so hard the handle stuck in the hallway sheetrock when it flew open. "Don't have a doorman," he gritted, bolting for the stairwell to jump down the center.

"Well maybe not a paid one," Tony replied, almost sounding unconcerned, "or he'd probably have a uniform that didn't look like he dug it out of a dumpster, but I recognize that 'You Shall Not Pass' attitude anywhere, and that guy looks like a biter, so uh... shit, he's fast. Maybe you better hurry it up, Cap."

Steve hurried, but there was still no sign of Bucky when he made it to the condo's entry lobby. Not a bootprint, not a shadow, not even a lingering smell of sweat and cordite in the air. Nothing but an empty room, fake plants, a few empty chairs, and buzzing, too-white lights that let no shadow bide. The urge to howl, curse, and put a fist through the wall in frustration was brief, but powerful, and Steve had to clench his teeth on it pretty hard before he could manage to enter his security code into the keypad and open the outside door.

"So. Not your doorman, huh?" Tony asked, a little cowed, and strangely unbothered when Steve stepped out into the night rather than ushering him into the building. "That your guy?"

"Bucky," Steve confirmed, not really surprised that Tony knew about his quest to locate his friend and bring him safely home. Given what the news programs had caught of the fights leading up to SHIELD's fall, it wasn't much of a logic jump for anybody, let alone a genius with legacy ties to the SSR, and presumably access to some of its oldest files. "Yeah. Damn it." Steve rubbed at his face with both hands, then sucked in a deep breath of humid Virginia night and blew it out hard. "Don't suppose you saw where he...?"

Tony grimaced, looking genuinely contrite. "Sorry. Left my infra red goggles in my other helmet. That I blew up last year." He craned a glance past Steve, peering through the security doors as if the small lobby might somehow be hiding a full grown man behind its potted fichus tree. "Dude's like a ninja. Or that Spiderman kid. Wait, he's not Spiderman, is he?"

And to that, Steve had to surrender a laugh. If HYDRA had managed to give Bucky the ability to fire sticky webs from his hands and cling to smooth vertical surfaces, their encounters would have gone _very_ differently, right from the start. "Nah, I'm pretty sure that kid stays close to Queens." He shook his head, and forced himself to shrug off the last of his frustration. Tony Stark was here in DC, hundreds of miles from his workshop, his robots, his girlfriend and his publicists, standing in the parking lot of Steve's new condominium complex at two in the morning, when they hadn't seen each other, or even really spoken in more than two years. There had to be a good reason for that.

"So," he said at last, "You said something about doughnuts?"

"Oh yeah," Tony startled a little, then held up a white, slightly battered pastry box. "Bomboloni's; best doughnuts in Manhattan. But you sure you don't want to, uh..." He gestured vaguely at the empty lobby again, and Steve shook his head.

"I'm sure." He was as tired of chasing Bucky as he figured Bucky was of being chased, and it was pretty clear that the man knew where Steve was to be found if he wanted him. Of the two ways Steve could have taken that, he was simply too tired to do any more worrying, or fretful hoping tonight. Whatever Bucky wanted, Steve could figure it out later.

Steve took the pastry box out of Tony's hand, noticing where the tape had already been pried up from the sides. For some reason that small proof of Tony Stark's lack of impulse control made him feel like smiling. Maybe because with all that had happened -- to them, to SHIELD, to the world -- some things were still the same. 

"You wanna get some coffee to go with these?" He offered. Tony's eyebrows went up immediately, and the corner of his mouth made a wicked little hook. Steve forcibly kept his face open and guileless, even as he groaned inwardly at having forgotten -- yet again -- what that invitation supposedly meant nowadays. "There's a 24 hour diner a few blocks down that way."

"Diner, huh?" Tony mused, peering. "You a regular?"

"Yeah. They do a good pie."

"Apple?"

"Cherry," Steve answered Tony's smirk with equal sass, and was rewarded with a bark of laughter.

"So I guess they like you okay there?" he asked then, casual as if they both couldn't hear the real question beneath it. ' _Do they know who you are? Will it be safe to talk?_ ' 

"This hour of night, it should be just Max and Perry working," he answered both questions with a shrug. "Pretty sure they won't mind me bringing food in just this once, so long as they get a good tip out of it."

"Challenge accepted, Capcicle," Tony chuckled, clapping him on the shoulder and turning them both toward the parking lot. "I'll drive."

"Yeah, you will," Steve agreed, thinking wistfully of his lost bike -- another casualty of the fall of SHIELD, and one he was beginning to find he missed more and more now that he and Sam had finally dragged themselves back to DC. That Harley had been the first thing he'd bought for himself once he'd convinced Fury he was sane, competent, and not likely to run amok in Times Square again -- the first thing he'd seen of the new Century that had seemed familiar enough to be enticing. And now, like so many other half-familiar things Steve had tentatively collected into his life, it was in pieces somewhere at the bottom of the Potomac river.

"I gotta say, for someone who just found out he had an assassin lurking in his elevator lobby, you don't seem very troubled," Tony broke into Steve's reverie with just the right brash irreverence as the sleek little coupe pulled out onto the empty street. "You're not getting all deathwishy on us now, are you?"

Steve cut a glance at him, stiffly offended for all of half a second. Then the sliding flare of a street light gleamed across Tony's face, revealing genuine concern instead of the mockery he expected, and none of the bitten-back pity so many other faces took on when the subject of his fall from the Helicarrier loomed on the conversational horizon. "Nope," he said then, stretching his legs as far as he could. "M' no good to Bucky, or to anybody else if I'm dead, am I?"

"So it's fair to guess this isn't the first time he's done this creepy-ex, stalkery thing then." It wasn't a question. Steve appreciated that.

"First time here, but yeah, he's come around before. Broke into a couple of my hotel rooms, stole some things -- shoes, a razor, soap, socks -- things he'd probably have had to steal from someone else if he didn't take 'em from me. Once he stole some plane tickets to New York, but nobody ever showed up at the gate to use 'em. Another time he took apart Sam's computer and swiped the power cord. Mostly though, it seemed like he was just following Sam and me around the east coast while we were following him around the remnants of HYDRA’s salted earth retreat." Steve laughed, trying to keep the weary bitterness out of his voice. "That got old quick."

"He ever come at you again?" There was no give in the question; it was all titanium alloy without a speck of hot rod paint on it. The sliding streetlights couldn't find any trace of the California playboy in the driver's seat now -- this was all Iron Man.

Steve shook his head. "Nah. Not like you're thinkin'. Bucky took a swing or two when we got close and he felt cornered, but mostly it seemed like he was just... tryin' to remember, I think. Maybe tryin' to follow me to things that could tell him what he needed to do next. He hasn't gone back to HYDRA, so he doesn't have orders now, just the mission he didn't complete from before. Even without the conditioning they put him through, that kinda thing can throw a soldier hard." Steve nodded at the upcoming intersection as Tony slowed for a red light. "Diner's half a block up, by the way. Red sign. There's a parking lot in the back, see it?"

"Yeah," Tony agreed, fingers tapping out drumbeats on the steering wheel while they both watched the night in shades of orange and red. "So you think he'll ever try to complete that last mission?" he asked as the light changed to green.

"Not really, no," Steve said, surprising himself with a straight answer he hadn't intended to give. "I mean, he's hurting and he's scared, and he's lashed out a couple of times, but I could tell he was holding back." Steve absently rubbed at his belly, and the healed-up bullet wound that didn't have any reason to hurt anymore, but still sometimes did anyway. "I think he... he needed to fight someone, but didn't really want to hurt anybody in particular, just needed to fight. He knew I could take it, knew he wouldn't hurt me... not really."

"Not for lack of trying," Tony groused, pulling into a parking space and killing the engine. Eyes dark, jaw set; an angry face, but angry _for_ him, not _at_ him, and Steve found himself surprised to realize that he could tell the difference now.

"No," he said, and offered up a smile. "If Bucky'd really wanted to kill me after the helicarriers went down, he could have. He had dozens of chances in the last few months, just like he gave me a few chances to take him out, if that'd been what I was after. Heck, Tony, he coulda come after me in the hospital, or left me in the river if he'd wanted me dead."

"Actually, he couldn't," Tony said, brusque and brittle as he unclipped his shoulder belt.

"What?"

"The hospital," Tony said. "Barnes couldn't have got to you there without a making one hell of a mess. President Ellis posted Secret Service all over Walter Reid when they brought you there. Turns out Ellis was on that list of HYDRA targets you saved. About ten names down from me." A quick glance, warmer now, and crinkling with a hint of smile at the corner of Tony's eye. "Nobody who wasn't Sam Wilson was even allowed to send you flowers without a full security clearance, body cavity check, a healthy campaign contribution, and maybe a strategic blowjob pr two."

"Well, Sam was with the group who found me, so I guess I can see why... wait, a blowjob?" Steve blinked, then again as the important details made it through. "Wait a minute, you... Tony, did you try to visit me?" Steve was charmed on one hand, baffled and somewhat annoyed on the other. "Nobody even told me you'd come by."

"Oh, you know," Tony answered, waving a careless hand as he flashed his mountebank's grin. "Your location was all top secret, above my clearance, and something I wasn't actually supposed to know. And the blow job was the deal-breaker, it turns out. Pepper says world leaders are definitely off the list for allowable affairs. Too much press; Stark Industries stocks would take a pounding." And here he winked, "So to speak."

Steve chuckled and popped his door open. "I think that's more than I ever expected to know about your relationship with Pepper," he said, taking his donuts and climbing out.

"Mm," Tony answered, voice noncommittal, but eyes considering. "Anyway, it's not like I had a lot of time for social visits or bedside vigils at the time anyway," he breezed on ahead, shorter legs working hard to reach the door and open it for Steve. "Coordinating the work crews around rescue teams and the damned press down on the river was crazier than a barrel of lobbyists in election year."

"You were working the salvage operations?" Steve led the way to the long chrome bar and choose a tall vinyl-covered seat near the far end. "I thought Stark Industries wasn't into weaponry anymore."

"Engine tech was mine," Tony replied with a glance at Max, the night waitress, who had recognized Steve and was tucking her physics homework under the counter, but not yet listening to their conversation. "Bad enough that HYDRA nearly got their tentacles on the repulsor designs through official channels, I wasn't about to stand back and let the Fed hand them over to someone like Hammer or Oscorp." And yeah, Steve did have to allow the sense in that.

Max came over with a carafe in one hand and two white cups in the other, and gave the pastry box a mild stinkeye as she set them out. 

"You cheating on us, Golds?" she demanded, hip shot and pouting dramatically at Steve as she filled his coffee cup. Six months ago, that pout, and the casual flirtation behind it would have rendered Steve blush-fumbling and foolish, but the Helicarrier crash, the way HYDRA had torn effortlessly through Steve's meagre life and left no useful shreds of it behind, that had put things like pretty girls and flirting into a very sharp sort of perspective for him. Turned out that flirting with a girl he knew he would never afford to have wasn't so hard to do at all.

"It's only a fling, Doll. It means nothing to me, really," Steve promised with a camera-ready grin as he flipped the box open and nudged it her way. "And does it really count as cheating if I give you first pick?"

"Given that I'm the one who brought the goods, I think technically that qualifies as threesome," Tony offered, leaning his elbows on the counter with a transparent leer at Max's well-fitted uniform, "Unless we're only allowed to watch, in which case that's a whole different kink."

Her brows rose at that, and she scraped Tony over with the hardened glare wielded by pretty waitresses everywhere. Steve's back tightened as he watched recognition spark in her eyes, suddenly worried that he might have burned his favorite diner by bringing Tony Stark and his celebrity reputation here. But then her lips quirked up wry, and she swiped two of the doughnuts from the box. "Well you would be the expert on exhibitionism, wouldn't you?" she said as she filled his cup and sashayed back to her homework just as if she didn't know damned good and well who Steve had brought in from the night, and had no idea what they might need to talk about alone in the wasted hours past midnight.

Steve breathed a silent thanks to whatever saint or angel looked out for fools and superheroes as he watched her go. Beside him, Tony gave a low, and very appreciative whistle. "Tell me you've hit that, Cap," he said without a trace of shame.

_"That_ would hit back," Steve grumbled, pointedly jostling the man in the ribs with an elbow. "and _you_ mind your manners, or I'll offer to do it for her. Now what was it you wanted to-" 

"Hang on," Tony cut him off, already tapping away at his phone, one handed while the other cradled his white china cup. "Just let me get this up, and..." Steve helped himself to a doughnut -- dark chocolate glazed, with marmalade inside -- while he waited. After a few seconds, Tony pulled a second phone from his pocket, tapped the two together, then set one beside him, and slid the first along the counter so it stopped just past Steve's elbow. At once the subtle noise in the open room faded to a blunted sort of hush, echoless and muted as if a thick velvet caul had draped over every hard surface in the diner. Impressed, Steve glanced at the phone, and grinned to see the Iron Man mask with a finger pressed to its lips on the screen.

"I take it this jams listening devices too?" he asked. His own voice sounded perfectly normal, as did Tony's when he replied.

"And trackers. SHIELD had pretty good records on the kind of bugs they used in your old place. You're keeping that one, by the way. Has a five foot radius of its own when the signal isn't twinned, but I figure it's better than nothing, given the size of your fan club."

"Ears everywhere," Steve agreed, deciding just this once to accept Tony's largesse without argument. "This why you came down from the City?" he asked, knowing it couldn't possibly be the only reason.

"So I guess we should get this part out of the way," Tony ignored the leading question, casual and offhand as if discussing the weather or the Dodgers' chances in the playoffs, and therefore solidly and deadly earnest. "That was a real boneheaded maneuver you pulled, taking on HYDRA without cutting me in on the action, Cap. And yes," he put up a hand, as if to fend off the highly skeptical glance Steve turned his way, "I say that in full remembrance of where I was and what I was doing last Christmas, which, I have been informed, was stupid and boneheaded too, and thus precisely why I am fully qualified to pass judgment on this latest fiasco of yours." He took a sip of his coffee, and chose a pinkish doughnut from the box, cutting a sideways glare at Steve. "You should have called me."

Steve bought a few moments with his own pastry, chewing carefully as he carded through his options. Telling Tony the barefaced truth -- that he hadn't even thought of calling for help as an option -- didn't seem like a good way of going forward without a fight, but he didn't like his chances of coming up with a plausible lie either. So he shrugged and temporized. "You blew up all your suits, Tony. Told the papers it was 'Operation Clean Slate'. Sounded an awful lot like a resignation letter to me."

He expected annoyance at that, but not the flash of hurt Stark's eyes showed before he covered it. "Oh, so we're back to 'what is Tony Stark without the suit' again? Thought we got past that, but hey, fine." Italian leather slapped linoleum like a glove to the cheek as he burst to his feet. "We can roll like that if you want-"

"What? No!" Steve caught Tony's elbow, blurting in alarm to keep him from storming away. "Jesus, no, Tony, that's not what I meant at all!"

The arm was rigid in his grip, but Tony eased back against the barstool and waved an ungracious hand for Steve to proceed, mouth pursed in a bratty scowl, but eyes only a little guarded. 

"You blew up your suits, sure, but the important part was that you said you were _done!_ " Steve tried to explain, realizing only as the words formed on his tongue how true they actually were. "How was I supposed to read that as 'sure, Rogers, go ahead and draw fire down on me and my very public life when everyone in the world knows I don't have the Suit anymore?'" He scraped a hand through his hair, feeling again the ghostly impression of hostile, hungry eyes all around him. 

"You know what Fury said to me just before they shot him down?" he asked. Tony's mouth quirked, telegraphing some quip that would probably make Steve want to pop him one, so Steve pushed on before he could deliver it. "He said not to trust anyone. _Anyone_."

Tony's brows drew down tight. "And you figured that included other Avengers?"

"Five hours after he said that, Natasha was lying to my face, Hawkeye was shooting at me in a public park, and Sitwell was sending strike teams at me with Live Fire orders!" Steve took another sip of his coffee, another moment to force down the emotion that still tried to rise, taut and hot into his throat at the memories. Tony was conspicuously silent beside him, and Steve got the impression it cost the man a lot to manage that. He glanced over and summoned up a smile for the effort. "It wasn't a matter of me not trusting you, Tony, but I sure as heck didn't trust the people around you. Not when agents I'd served with _and_ trusted were trying to shoot me down. How could I draw fire to you, to Ms. Potts, knowing that you'd disarmed yourself?"

"Yeah, well," Tony replied, irony in his arched brow and grudging forgiveness in his eyes. "Turns out we were in the line of fire anyway _which_ ," he forestalled Steve's protest with a raised hand, "I concede you couldn't have known, even if you should have guessed it, because since when is Tony Stark not on everybody's 'naughty' list?"

Steve offered back a chuckle and took another doughnut. "I dunno. That Everhart gal from Vanity Fair seems to like you well enough." Then he patted Tony on the back until he finished choking on the last of his coffee.

"My point," Tony wheezed, ducking away from Steve's hand at last, "The point that I am making here, is that we should have worked together. Both times. Probably more than just those both times." He took a deep breath, looking unaccountably nervous, then turned to face Steve on his stool, and took both of his hands. "So. You wanna take out HYDRA with me, Cap?"

And Steve knew better, he really did, but there was something so childlike in that sober gaze and promise of impending mayhem, that Steve couldn't keep his grin hidden. Tony's eyes turned gleeful when he tried to school it away though. "I know it's kinda your bag and all," he went on, "but I'm totally willing to cut you a slice of the action. And don't even pretend you don't want in on the happy explosive funtimes, you old scofflaw, you."

"Hey, so if you're gonna propose to him," Max said, breaking into the bubble of silence with coffeepot in one hand and her cel phone in the other, "Let me set up the shot first. The backlighting's for shit over here."

"Excuse me, Miss," Tony shot back, all faked affront as she refilled both their cups. "I happen to be a happily-"

"Girlfriend," Steve managed to stop choking long enough to gasp it out. "He's got a girlfriend."

"Psssht," Max rolled her eyes, but put her phone away. "Like anybody who can read a tabloid thinks _that_ matters."

It was on the tip of Steve's tongue to protest that, but then he realized that Tony hadn't so much as frowned at the implication. Instead, he just shot back a grin and a wink that would have been pure confirmation, if Steve hadn't met Miss Potts and seen for himself what a force of nature she could be. "And what _does_ your girlfriend think of all this?" Steve murmured as Max sauntered away again. "She was part of the reason you disarmed, wasn't she?"

The smile Tony turned on him then was a deeply fond thing, warm and resonant with such adoration it practically pushed at him across the space between them. "Yeah, she was. Funny thing though, turns out Ms. Virginia Potts was on HYDRA's hit list too, all on her own merits. That kind of changed some angles on the whole Iron Man debate."

Steve put his coffee cup down carefully. "Yeah, I'd think it would. So your clean slate's got a new project on it?"

"Two, actually," Tony answered cheekily. "His and Hers. Pep said I wasn't allowed to have a suit again unless I built her one too. Hers is strictly medevac though; a rescue unit." He leaned in close, whispering too loud to escape anybody's notice, if there hadn't been a noise cancelling field around them. "She doesn't like violence."

"Ah," Steve said, but he was thinking of Sam and the EXO-7 Falcon. Of how it was to know you had someone quick, light, and strong to catch you if you were falling, or to dig you out if you went under. And what a comfort it was to be the one who was finally strong enough to rescue your rescuer, too. Steve would have been the worst kind of hypocrite to pretend he couldn't see Ms. Potts' point there.

"You can even bring your new bestie on board if you want," Tony offered, abrasion creeping into his cheer. "Flyboy, I mean." Steve schooled his expression to blank confusion. "Road trip rommate? Wingman with the killer assets?"

"You mean Sam?"

"Yeah, that guy." Tony grinned, ignoring the warning in Steve's tone. "He could play too, since he's obviously got the chops."

"Well I don't know if he'd be all that interested, given that we just got back into town three days ago and apparently has some family atonement for missed birthdays to do." Steve answered after a moment, taking the last doughnut and tearing it in half. 

"I could make him some new wings?" Tony's answer was probably meant to sound more like an offer than a plea, but Steve wasn't going to point the difference out.

Instead, he just smiled and shrugged. "Well, I'll give you his number, but I think if you're gonna make him an offer, you should probably learn his name." He set the smaller half on the napkin beside Tony's cup, and ate the rest in two unabashedly smirking bites while Tony scowled at him.

"And here I thought you were supposed to be good for enlistment," Tony groused.

And Steve wished he could have laughed at that, taken it for the joke Tony meant it to be, but as the food turned to damp ash on his tongue, and his belly twitched with the ghost of anguish not-long-past, he could only shake his head. "Not right now, I ain't," he said once his throat cleared enough to let him speak. Tony made a noise of rude disbelief, but Steve shook his head before he could put it to words.

"I ain't, Tony. Doesn't matter what I wear, or how big I smile for the cameras." He sighed, searching for the words to explain. "To recruit people, you either have to be willing to lie to them, or you gotta _believe_. You gotta know in your heart that what you're pitching is really the best way forward, not just for you, but for _everyone_. I was never any good at the lying to begin with, and..." he shook his head, drained his cup, and winced the last, bitter draught down. "And after this summer, I'm not sure I got that kind of faith left in much of anything." He dragged up a smile as he turned to face Tony, wanting to lighten the gloom a bit, but had to let it fade when he found his friend staring at him, eyes wide and earnest in the too-bright cafe. 

Steve hadn't ever seen a look like that on Tony Stark, hadn't even imagined anything so still and gravid on the mercurial inventor's face. Maybe that was why he didn't move when Tony captured Steve's right hand in both of his, then held Steve's gaze just as trapped as he leaned in close and pronounced, "Bullshit."

The vulgarity startled a laugh out of Steve, and Tony pressed on before Steve could school it away. "Okay first, I've seen you bluff two geniuses, a demi-god, and a woman who lies for a living, and take an entire jackpot of Oreos on a pair of goddamned _threes_ ," Tony said, not letting Steve's hand go, "And second, you damn well _do_ believe that HYDRA has to be stopped, I know you do!"

"That's certainty, not belief," Steve corrected by way of weary agreement. "Doesn't take any leap of faith to know that they'll keep trying to take the whole world prisoner like they've been doing all along. Folks like them... Schmidt, Zola, Pierce, all the people they recruited ... they don't stop."

"At least while there are still heads to cut off," Tony nodded back. "And you're the best decapitator on this playground, Cap." Steve made a face. Tony took it as a challenge. "No, seriously, you're like the Samurai Sword, Execution axe, big-daddy Guillotine of the HYDRA-bashing game. We should totally get you some kind of cauterizing edge on that shield, so you could-"

"Cut my own hand in half first time I caught it on the rebound?" Steve managed, laughing until he remembered that chances were, he wouldn't ever get the shield back into his hand again. It was like missing a limb, not having the shield -- an ache of absent weight, an itch to turn to it and take it up before the sinking remembrance that it was gone, that he'd let it fall. Another faithful ally lost to Gravity and Steve's own weakness.

Thinking of Bucky had been like that, before the crash; a series of aborted twitches that had started life as a wondering laugh and a call to look at that, before the realization of his absence loomed up again. It wasn't much better, now Steve knew Bucky hadn't died. If anything, that phantom ache was worse.

He sighed and rolled his left shoulder, where the tension tended to gather these days no matter how much he tried to stretch it away. "I don't think I'll be much use to you anyway, Tony," he confessed. "I mean I spent two years literally surrounded by HYDRA's most vicious killers and I never once spotted them for what they were."

"And again I say; bullshit." Tony tapped his coffee cup against his forehead in a kind of snide salute. "Cap, you know their chops better than anybody else. Than EVERYbody else, if we're being literal about it. Sure, maybe not as individuals, but as an organization, as a structure that built its habits and traditions in a time and around people that nobody else alive really understands. You know HYDRA's roots, while the rest of us are just grasping after the branches, or knocked out when the fruit falls on our heads." 

Steve gave him a skeptical look. "Lotta people keep telling me that things have changed since the 40's."

"I'm a businessman, Cap," Tony said, ignoring Steve's goad. "That means I'm a gambler by nature. I figure the odds against my resources, I jump, and I hope to come out on top, whether that's a stock trade, a corporate acquisition, a prototype flying suit, or a terrorist cell's weapons cache. Planning isn't a big part of my procedure, once you get past the data gathering part of things."

"I'm sure Ms. Potts loves that." 

"She and the board of directors have mutual pity parties every quarter," Tony affirmed without a trace of remorse. "Thing is, HYDRA's not points on a stock ticker. They're not mechanical details, math and physics, and they're not lowlife scavengers picking over my tech for useful parts. They're HYDRA, and from what we're hearing, even broken and on the run they're more dangerous than most armies." A tic jumped beside Tony's eye, brief and brutally suppressed as he added, "Human armies, anyway."

"From what you're hearing," Steve prompted, interest caught despite himself. 

Tony grinned, triumph in the set of his teeth. "SHIELD loyalists had to have somewhere to go after you kicked the game board over. Iron Man had basically privatized world peace before Loki showed up and raised the stakes, and most of Fury's True Believers remembered that when they needed a gravitational center. They'd rather have had you, of course, but with your star spangled road trip and all --"

"And this is where you're getting your data for this operation you're pitching?" Steve cut him off, letting his skepticism show on his face. "Ex SHIELD agents?"

Surprisingly, Tony didn't rise to it, nor did the victory fade out of his challenging stare. "A lot of them were in position to see who jumped which way while things were going down, Cap. And they all want a slice of their own back. We've got a vetting process in place, and we've weeded out more than a couple of sleepers already, but what we're doing now is pulling together a big picture out of a thousand points of unrelated data, and-"

"And that makes your battle plans vulnerable to HYDRA if the data they give you is corrupted," Steve nodded, weathering a growing certainty that he might be hooked after all.

"Which is why I want you," Tony poked Steve in the shoulder, and even though it was well clear of the long-healed knife wound, Steve still had to force himself not to flinch from it. Tony didn't seem to notice, at least. "Look, even if you're not ready to suit up and bash heads again yet, you still have the best eye for HYDRA's patterns of anybody alive today who isn't actually HYDRA. I want that on our side. Will you let me show you what we've got? Take a look at it and see if anything stands out to you?"

And it was tempting, that. The very nature of the Howling Commandos had meant that Colonel Phillips had quickly rolled Steve into the heart of his strategic meetings, and let him have his say on most of the long range planning of their missions. Fury, on the other hand, had given Steve only enough information to allow the success of his ops. _Compartmentalization_ , memory supplied the word with some bitterness the perfect environment for a parasite like HYDRA to creep through unnoticed. 

Steve's work with SHIELD had been nearly all tactics; immediate assessment, on the spot planning and execution, and if Steve was going to be honest with himself, he did miss being able to look at the whole campaign and see how all the pieces were moving across the board together.

He glanced at Max, who was headed back their way with the coffee. "Not here," he said under his breath as she approached. Silencing devices were one thing, but he wasn't about give the girl a glimpse of anything that could put her into real danger.

Tony's grin slid sideways and turned wicked as she neared. "Course not. I left all my etchings back at the hotel, gorgeous." He leaned close as Steve hid a smile in his water glass, all but fluttering his lashes, and waiting until Steve had a mouthful to leer, "You'll love it, my hotel; it's got a whirlpool tub en suite..." 

Max stopped, cast a scathing eye over Steve's helpless, exhausted sputtering, and the possessive hand Tony had curled around Steve's elbow. Then she made a peevish face that only tickled Steve more. "Seriously?" she waved her free hand as if fanning the air between them. "I mean _seriously_?"

"Don't be jealous, of my etchings," Tony cheeked back, letting go of Steve and sliding a single, crisp bill across the counter. "Steve's a sucker for great etchings." He caught his phone up from the counter and slipped it into his pocket, and Steve had just enough presence of mind to do the same with the one beside him.

"Aw now, that is just not fair," Max complained, but she still snagged the hundred as she turned on her heel and headed back to the register. Even in the modern world that had to be a hell of a tip for two cups of coffee and half an hour of being ignored. 

"I don't need any change," Tony called back to her, towing Steve behind him as he slid from his stool and headed for the door. ”I like things juuuust how they are."

"NOT FAIR!" was her only reply


	2. Care and Feeding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony fails his save. Steve makes a call.

** Tony **

Howard Stark hadn't been the very best of parents -- that was pretty well known at this point. Tony didn't exactly chat it around in interviews, but the papers had made the pretty obvious connection between Tony's youthful douchebaggery and Howard's A-double-plus parenting skills, and he hadn't really seen much point in contradicting that speculation. Not given the drunken instances where Tony would have cheerfully elected Howard Fucking Stark for Outstanding Prick of the Century. Still there had been one time, one alarming, amazing, appalling time in Tony's life when Howard Stark, his Dad, had actually been just about perfect.

Tony had gotten into trouble at school. Again. Nothing quite legally actionable; nothing blown up, stolen, or burned down, just a 12 year old Tony being Tony, (bored, lonely, isolated and trying to leverage any kind of intimacy he could out of peers who saw him as just an annoying child,) and making out with 15 year old Roy Davidson, (debate team captain, soccer center, two girlfriends, great arms and no apparent pimples,) in the furnace room, and being caught distinctly out of uniform by the janitor, the soccer coach, and a history teacher who'd been sneaking down to have a smoke. 

In other words; it had been the end of the world.

The Dean had hauled the boys to his office, where he'd ranted, raved and preached for a solid hour before he called Howard and Mrs. Davidson up to the school so they could take part in the ritual shaming. Tony, not yet quite as inured to the process of expulsion as he would be in a few years, had been scared, mad at himself for being scared, and therefore determined to go down swinging. At least that way, he guessed, he might win one fight before his Dad showed up and murdered him. So he'd sassed and snarked and goaded the Dean Carlysle into such a frothing rage while they waited, that poor Davidson had puked all over the place in pure terror. He was actually cleaning up the Turkish carpet on his hands and knees when his mom showed up.

Focus removed from himself, Tony had watched Mrs. Davidson's first, fierce outrage in her son's defense falter and fail when Carlysle started in with the list of their perverse activities. All they'd done was kiss and feel each other up a bit, but to hear that skinny bastard talk around it, you'd have thought Tony was tag teaming the entire Jai Alai team while snorting lines of cocaine off a cheerleader's butt. 

Mrs. Davidson had chilled over, gone pale, and stopped even trying to stand up for her kid then. She could barely bring herself to look at him, let alone offer a comforting touch, which Roy, still looking like he'd keep on puking if he hadn't emptied himself already, obviously needed from his mom right then. And if a Mom could freeze her son out like that, how the fuck was Tony supposed to pretend that things were going to be anything less than brutal when Howard showed up and learned how low his little fuck-up had fallen.

But then, to everyone's surprise Howard Stark actually had arrived -- with a lawyer, a moving van, and a look of impending doom on his face. 

Without giving Carlysle even a moment to pontificate, Howard had marched into the office and declared his intention to bring his son home from school that very afternoon. Oh and also, he'd be expecting the school bursar to cut his refund check before the movers finished packing Tony's things, Tony's schooling records could be handed over to the Lawyer for assumption by qualified tutors, (and the scorn had practically dripped from that ' _qualified_ '!) Oh, and also, the school could expect no further support from Stark himself, or from his company, or from the Maria Stark Foundation.

As games of Chicken went, even through the veil of years and drowned brain cells, Tony could admit it had been masterful. Dean Carlysle had flinched so fast he probably strained something, but the beautiful thing was that even when Carlysle had started backpedaling, Howard _hadn't_. His murderous scowl hadn't shifted during the explanations and equivocations and recitations of school policy, and when he'd decided he'd had enough of the wheedling, Howard had gathered Tony in tight against his side and explained in cuttingly simple terms that he was disappointed in the basic quality of the school's curriculum. He expected his son's school to take a greater interest in its students intellect and mental development than in their sexual orientation, and if the administrators were bent on wasting everyone's time on soap opera dramatics, then clearly it had no business billing itself as a magnet school at all. 

Then he'd frogmarched Tony out to the car, leaving Dean Carlysle to the lawyer's tender mercies, and the lawyer to, presumably, catch a ride back to the City in the moving van.

Tony had fully expected to pay Hell on the drive home. Felt like he actually deserved it a little, given that he didn't even _like_ Roy Davidson much, and had only started things with him to get the popular kids he ran with to quit being condescending assholes. 

Tony had known even when he'd started riling Davidson up that it was a bad idea, but fuck, it had been better than being ignored or treated like a child for the rest of the year. However once he was trapped alone in the car with his dad and looking down the barrel of Howard Stark's Implacable Scorn, Tony was seriously beginning to wish he'd at least managed to get off before the janitor had walked in on them.

But instead of the expected telling off, Howard had been quiet for miles, eyes fixed on the road, but his mind clearly miles away. Tony hadn't known whether to be grateful for the reprieve, or furious at the dismissal. Then finally as twilight had begun to take hold of the sky, Howard had begun to talk. Not to tell Tony all the ways he'd been selfish, idiotic, stupid and childish, not to point out the wasted opportunity, Tony's ingratitude, or the fact that Starks were be better than that... no.

Instead, in a voice low and smooth with years, Howard told Tony about how, three days after Captain America had led the survivors of the 107th into the Allied camp, Howard had walked into a map room at SSR headquarters to find Steve Rogers and Sergeant Barnes holding each other and kissing like their hearts were breaking. He told Tony how he'd never seen any two people so terrified and so in love in all his life before, or since. And that no matter what people thought about men like them back then or even today, it wasn't a sickness. Couldn't _be_ sickness, or Erskine's serum would have cured it.

"And if the best man I have ever met could be gone for another man, especially that idiot Barnes," he'd huffed, finally cutting a brightly strained look in Tony's direction, "then my son being gay isn't anything that needs curing anywhere but in _other_ people's heads."

Tony, a little too giddily terrified to admit to his father that he didn't think he really _was_ all the way gay, had chewed his lip for a moment and asked, "But I thought Captain America was supposed to be in love with Agent Carter."

"He was," was the only answer he got. 

But before Tony could be the obnoxious little swot about that, his father proceeded to launch into the most mortifying, excruciating, and biologically precise Birds and Bees and Boys and Blackmail talk in the entire history of mankind. It hadn't exactly scared Tony straight, but it had definitely put the lifelong fear of STDs into him. 

Which was better than nothing, at least, and hey -- at least he'd survived the 80's.

***

It was another couple of hours, five papercuts, a whole pot of crappy hotel coffee, and a bathroom break before Tony's mouth decided to screw everything up: a new personal record where dealing with Steve Rogers was concerned.

It wasn't actually Tony's fault though, because he'd been _behaving_ himself ever since he'd picked the big blond trainwreck up that night. Tony had been actually making an effort not to let the prickly, panicky, helpless terror that had bloomed in his guts while he'd watched news footage of Steve's fight with the masked assassin in downtown DC blossom into an outright bloodletting, name calling, hair pulling, clawing and biting scrap. Pepper and Rhodey both had years of dealing with Tony's fear-based shit-stirring, and they knew when he was deflecting. However as they’d proven in the helicarrier labs over Manhattan, Cap had no such understanding sympathy for Tony’s issues, and came equipped with hair trigger temper of his own. 

And he’d also proven himself willing to march out solo into the brave new world and take its monsters on with no appreciable backup whatsoever. Which was really not conducive at all to settling Tony’s nerves over the whole DC debacle, really.

So once Tony had gotten Steve back to the hotel that night, he’d been on his best behavior. He’d tried to keep them both focused on the analytics and the data, on SHIELD and HYDRA: where they were distinct and where they blurred together. Who might have been complicit, versus simply complying, and where the power-players might have been gathering strings to yank. 

And too, Tony tried to keep his brain from endlessly replaying the memory of how Captain America had dropped his shield and knelt in the street, head bowed before the guns as if he'd had no hope of ever standing upright again. It had _hurt_ , watching Cap give up like that. It had _terrified_ him. Tony had not, in any way been prepared for just how much.

That lost, terrified sense of the world turning over onto its head had only scraped itself deeper when Tony'd had to watch helplessly from New York as the Insight carriers crushed each other and the Tryskelion into rubble. The only sign of Steve Goddamnit Rogers that any camera had been able to pick out of the chaos had been that fucking shield, a falling flash of patriotic shine flickering to silver and back again as it tumbled like a tossed coin in the sunlight. Heads or Tails, call your shot; Captain America or the Winter Soldier surviving; SHIELD or HYDRA dying in flames.

Or, as it turned out, all of the above, because there could never really be an easy answer with Rogers, could there? 

And Tony didn't want to fight with Cap, really, not beyond wanting to dig fire out from under the clinging, cloying weariness that hadn't left Steve's eyes the whole time they'd been together. He wanted to fight the sense of despair he could practically smell rolling off the man while they sat, side by side in the hotel’s crappy little eat-in kitchenette and plotted to win back the world. Tony didn't want to fight Cap, but damned if he didn't want to take a swing at the man's demons for him. And really, looking at the tragic shadows in those blue eyes of his, who wouldn't?

So it was that, on the lea side of three in the morning, stiff necked, a little giddy with stress, and prepared to ride the work-rush right into the sunrise even without the aid of Jarvis, ACDC, or unhealthy amounts of caffeine, Tony found himself half turning in his chair as Steve returned from dealing with the inevitable consequences of coffee, and blurting out, "You do realize that Howard knew, don't you?" 

How he managed to keep from slapping his own hand over his traitorous mouth the instant those words cleared his lips, Tony would never be sure.

Steve paused only a second, then finished his bone popping stretch and dropped back into the lounge sofa. "He knew about Agent Garrett's German grandfather?” He shrugged, puzzlement at war with weariness in his face, “Well I guess he might have, but I figured Operation Paperclip was... What's wrong?"

And it was almost within Tony's grasp to just shake his head and let it roll by; to blame the slip on the lateness of the hour, or Cap's geriatric hearing, or the bourbon Tony had stashed in the kitchen, but had decidedly _not_ been drinking because cars were involved, but maybe he should start to soon if his mouth's going to be getting him in trouble anyway. He actually tried, in fact, but what came out of his mouth instead of a bullshit evasion was actually the merciless truth: "He knew about you and Barnes, Cap."

There was this thing that Bruce's face would sometimes do; a too still, too polite, total freeze up. The eyes would be aimed at your face, but the attention was either ten yards beyond you, or fixed on some invisible middle point, as if he could see a single atom in the air between you, and he had to watch it carefully so that it wouldn't explode. 

Tony had never had trouble guessing what that expression meant on Bruce's face, (one ground-zero witness of those safety parameters failing had been plenty, thanks everso). But there was fresh blood under the ice when it locked Steve's face into neutral, and Tony found he just could not leave him there, frozen up and aching and lost -- not again.

"Or I guess maybe you didn't know," Tony went on, abandoning his chair to go and grab the Bourbon. "But anyway, he did know. I don't think he ever told anybody. Obviously, or they'd have thrown you a Pride parade the moment you showed up in New York." The bottle clanked against the rim of Tony's coffee cup, liquor sloshing dangerously before he checked his pour. "Anyway, I thought maybe it'd help if you knew that there was someone still around who knew, y'know? Someone who had some idea of what it all..." he turned, waving a hand through the air between them as if to scatter away the looming sense of ‘ _oh my God, Tony Stark, will you please shut UP?_ ’ "Y'know, meant. Means. To you."

The disapproving wrinkle had somehow appeared on Steve's face without a single muscle moving. "I." Steve swallowed, those shocked blue eyes flicking down to the scattered reams of personnel and operations reports that covered the hotel suite's sitting area, dresser, and half the floor. When Steve managed to look back up, he'd found a smile to pull on -- shabby and heartbreakingly transparent. 

"Thanks. Thank you. Tony," Steve said, and clapped both palms on his knees -- universal sign language for 'I am running away from this conversation now and this is the only warning you will get'. "Welp. I guess I should be heading-"

"You should stay," Tony blurted, stepping close to press a hand down on Steve's shoulder, even though he knew it couldn't possibly work, and what the hell was he even thinking trying to hold the super soldier to the couch when he was ready to leave? Steve looked as surprised as Tony felt when it did though. 

"Just stay here tonight," Tony went on, trying for smooth, knowing he was not anywhere near it, and yet still somehow certain, as he moved to stand in the space between Steve's spread knees, that this was absolutely right. "Don't go back alone."

That brought the wariness back into Steve's shocked face, and Tony could see every tense, frustrated moment of the last six months come home to roost in his eyes as they narrowed. "Why not?" he asked, his hands gripping Tony's hips in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with sex or comfort or any soft thing. "What in hell's going on?"

"Whoa, hey," Tony yelped, putting both hands up between them and patting the air for a second. "Nothing's going on," he promised. "Nothing at all; just ... Y’know, you alone in an empty apartment with a few boxes and a big lump of not a damn thing to show for the last six months of your life, is all." The disapproving wrinkle was deeper now, and with it had come that hard, defensive Stuttgart glint that Tony had absolutely not missed seeing in Steve's eyes. 

He sighed, set his hand a little further up the curve of Steve's neck, where he could feel the pulse charging under his palm, then reached up his other thumb to gently press the creased brow smooth. Again, to the surprise of both, Steve allowed both touches, his eyelids fluttering down to fan on his cheeks as he sighed and let the frown go. 

"It sucks, Cap," Tony murmured, half mesmerized as he stroked along the ridge of Steve's brow line. "It's fucked up, you being all alone after all you've done, all you've had to do. I kinda hate it and I'm pretty sure you hate it too, so..." he shrugged. "So you should stay."

Steve opened his eyes, the blue cut thick with shadows . "Stay here." It wasn't a question, but Tony nodded anyway. "With you." Steve cut a pointed glance through the suite’s french doors, to the king sized bed. His expression was just as skeptical as before, but his hands had softened over the ridges of Tony's hips -- holding now, rather than clamping down. And that was something, right?

"Doesn't have to be like that," Tony said, combining a shrug with a headshake and a smile. "Could if you wanted to, of course, but it's not like I _would_ force you even if I could. I have kind of a kink for enthusiastic consent, you know?" He shifted his legs to the outside of Steve's knees, and was gratified when the hold on his hips turned supporting. A faint flush had risen into Steve's cheeks by the time Tony had settled down astride his lap, but Steve's chin had tilted upward, telegraphing a skeptical permission for the gentle kiss Tony dropped against those not-quite-soft lips. 

Call it a gift, call it an instinct, call it a mutant goddamned power, but the truth was that Tony had always known when he had a chance with someone. Even if it was a chance he didn't care to take, or a dance he wouldn't want to finish, he'd always been able to tell it when, beneath the disinterest, the anger, the scorn, or even Congressional subpoenas, he'd had an in. And with Steve, still and watchful and worn silent in the long night, Tony _knew_ he had an in. 

He could pry this man wide open with just the tiny crack he'd been allowed; could scoop him out clean, or just crawl inside and luxuriate in the glory of all that... everything if Tony wanted to. He'd cracked harder shells in his time.

But Steve, Tony figured, was cracked enough. So he tilted his head, stole one more gentle kiss from those unreasonably soft lips, and then pulled away just _so_ much. Just enough to give the man space to think.

Which he did, eyes fixed on Tony's face, flickering as if he was reading code in the line of his nose or the angle of his beard. His hands were solid warmth against Tony's waist, one thumb fretting gently at the belt loop, pulling his shirt just a little looser with each fidget. 

"Why?" Steve asked after a long moment, and Jesus but there were a whole lot of questions caught up in that one word.

Tony picked one of them at random. "You're lonely. No, don't frown at me, you are. But you totally make it work for you. I've never seen anybody rock the mental Fortress of Solitude like you do. It's more than a shield, it's like you're wearing full battle armor, all polished up like a mirror to show everybody whatever it'll take to get them to leave you just like that; all safe, and alone, and _starving_ in there."

Steve huffed, stirred restlessly, but Tony stilled him with another kiss -- cheating, and he knew it, but he couldn't not try. "I know what's under that armor though;” Another soft, quick kiss. “I can see you inside it, Steve, and-” one more, as if he couldn’t quite help himself. “And it makes me want to punch right through that stoic grin-and-bear-it bullshit,” Another. Maybe he _couldn’t_ help himself... “Drag you out into the world and-” One more. Maybe he just didn’t want to control himself. “And _feed_ you." 

Steve’s lips spread beneath his, the chuckle a startled sound. " _Feed_ me?"

"Christ yes," Tony insisted, fingers brushing the fine hair at the nape of Steve's neck, then threading in more boldly when he didn't object. "You're like a dog-"

"Thanks..."

"A big, gorgeous, loyal heartbreaker of a dog," Tony insisted, jostling Steve out of his glare by the gentle hold on his scruff. "When your guy was dead you mourned for him, sure; you could mope a little, get your grieving out, take out your rage on the bad guys, and maybe one day move on. But now he's back and you know it." Steve tensed beneath him, restless thumb stilling against Tony's waist, but there was no way Tony could take the warning-off now. 

"Now Bucky's out there somewhere you can't get to him, and he won’t come to you, and you're ready to sit outside his locked door and starve without a whimper waiting for him to open it up and let you in. It fucking _kills_ me, Steve," He swept a thumb across the arc of Steve's cheek, as if wiping away a tear the man would never let himself shed. "What kind of heartless bastard would I be if I didn't at least try to feed you?"

Steve's jaw flexed beneath his palm. "I don't need pity, Tony," he said, somehow managing to sound lost, a little hopeful despite the warning.

"Damn straight you don't," Tony laughed. "And that's good, because I have never pitied you -- not even when the whole world thought _you_ were dead."

"Then what is this, really?" Steve asked, sliding his hands up Tony's back to cup his shoulders and tip him forward into another kiss that was as demanding as Tony’s had been coaxing. "This a lark?" he murmured hard against Tony's mouth, "An adventure? A notch on your score card? Bragging rights?"

Tony laughed, and stole the kiss back from him with a twist of his head and a sneaky bit of tongue. "Like anybody'd believe me," he managed after a long moment. Then he used his grip on Steve's head to put a very deliberate distance between them, and to fix the man with a sober stare. "It's mercy, if it has to be anything, Steve. It's comfort, if you'll let yourself take that from the likes of me, and if not, then maybe it can be a nice long cuddle, and/or the best goddamned blow job of your life." He smiled at Steve's chuff of laughter, and pecked a single kiss onto the point of his nose. "But it's also your choice. I'm only making the offer."

Steve gave him that reading stare again, and again, Tony made himself choke back his nerves and face it down. There was some hardcore tactical numbercrunching going on in those sky-blues, fumbled up with drifts of weary suspicion and simple human want so deep and strong Tony could all but smell them. At last, a corner of Steve's lips twitched down in an annoyed kind of not-smile that fooled precisely no one. "And what does Miz Potts think about you making offers like that?" he asked, bone dry skepticism utterly failing to hide the wary hope behind it.

Tony, having expected _that_ question much earlier on in the negotiations, sat back on Steve's knees and plucked his phone out of his pocket with a laugh. "Oh no. We don't ever play this he-said-she-said game, Cap," he explained when the Stuttgart glare started to sweep the tentative warmth from Steve's face. "You're getting this right from the Pepper's mouth."

"Tony, it's three in the-" Steve began, reaching for the phone as Tony sent the call through on speaker.

Tony craned away, trusting Steve's hand on his waist not to let him fall. "Hey Pep," he said as the ringing stopped, "you asleep yet?"

"Not anymore, honey," she said around a yawn. "I thought we talked about you doing this all-nighter crap though."

Blushing furiously, Steve tugged Tony closer by his belt, still reaching for the phone. Tony evaded him with a quick shift of the phone to his other hand. "Good, 'cause this time I promise I'm not anywhere near a welding torch."

"Tony, you can't just-" Steve hissed.

"So Steve wants to know if he's allowed to make out with me," Tony barreled on, not even bothering to keep the smirk out of his voice.

"Tony!"

"What?" he laughed, still holding the phone aloft, even though Steve had quit reaching in order to hide his burning face behind his hand. " _I_ already know the answer, Cap, you're the skeptical one here!"

"Tony, behave," Pepper scolded wearily from the phone. "Captain Rogers?"

"Yes Ma'am?" Steve somehow managed to speak clearly without coming out from behind his palm. But he also didn't shove Tony off his lap, or even let go of his belt, so Tony was good with figuring his 'in' was still pretty solid.

"Don't let Tony push you into anything you don't want to do, okay?" Pepper went on, warming the gloom with that reassuring smile you didn't have to see in order to feel. 

It did Steve a world of good, that invisible smile, and he managed a deep, bracing breath before he let go of his face to reply. "Not sure Tony's capable of that, Ma'am."

"Oh, you'd be surprised, super soldier," Tony cheeked at him, gleeful and unashamed.

"You'd be unconscious, genius," Steve replied with a forbidding scowl that didn't manage to get anywhere near his eyes. Tony wanted to try and kiss it right off, and he was pretty sure from the spark in Steve's eye that the Captain would give him a fair shot at it, only Pepper reminded them both of her virtual presence with a pointed cough first. Steve jumped guiltily and Tony clutched at his shoulders, momentarily worried he might be dropped.

"That said," Pepper went on in her best Call-to-Order voice, "if you _are_ interested in what he's offering, Steve, please don't stop yourself on my account, okay?"

Steve's eyebrows went up as if he was surprised, but his gaze, which stayed locked on Tony's face, was full of double-dog-dare. "So that's how it is, ma'am?" he laughed.

"Yes, Captain," she replied, all but purring, "that's how it is. But if you put your tongue into Tony's mouth," she went on, distracting Steve from doing exactly that, "you're going to lose the right to call me ma'am, okay? It'll have to be Pepper from that moment on, because I won't be on a last-name basis with someone from whom I'm at a current one-kiss remove."

"That's a weird rule," Tony complained, sliding his hands back to lace his fingers together behind Steve's neck. "But does it mean I can call Hill-"

"No," Pepper said.

"You didn't even-"

"No."

"I'm just saying-"

This time it was Steve who cut him off, though he didn't use words to do it. "Stark," he said, grinning as he pulled away again, "Maybe you should quit while you're ahead."

"Hello," Tony said, and stole back his kiss, "have you met me? I'm Tony Stmph...mmmmm..."

"So I'm guessing we're done here?" Pepper asked after awhile.

Steve startled away, blushing hard, but still grinning. "Um yeah, thanks. Um. Thanks for your time, Ma'am. Um. Pepper," he spared a moment from his stammering to shoot Tony a quelling glare that did nothing to subdue Tony's urge to laugh at him. At least until Steve plucked the phone from his fist in a grab so quick Tony almost missed it. "Sorry we woke you. Goodnight." Then, like a true luddite, he pitched the phone over his shoulder without a second glance, and grabbed two big handfuls of Tony's ass. 

Preparing himself to be hefted in tight against Steve's chest and carried to the bed, Tony grinned, and wiggled down into Steve's grip. "So does this mean you're gonna put your tongue in my mouth?" he dared.

Steve's grin went from adorable and just a little dirty, to gorgeously evil and worthy of a quarantine-for-two in nothing flat. "My tongue?" he smiled, too bright, too innocent, and somehow too filthy for words. "Oh, that'll be the least of it." Then he tossed Tony over his shoulder, face down in a fireman's carry, and hauled him, squawking with outraged laughter, to the bed.


	3. The Space Between Breaths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pillow talk, the walk of shame (minus the shame) and a homecoming.

** Steve **

"Do you sleep?" Steve mumbled, and Tony jumped in his skin, hugging the tablet to his naked chest in an obviously reflexive reaction.

Then in a flash, the guilty alarm vanished under a veneer of insouciance and a careless shrug. "When I don't have ideas," he admitted, dropping the tablet back to his knees and looking down at it again. The sky outside the windows was just silvering toward dawn, but still no match for the tablet’s glow as it lit up the architecture of muscle, scar and bone that was Tony’s chest, the artful baroque sculpture of his beard, and the constellation of suck-marks along his collarbones that made something in Steve’s chest rumble with pleasure. 

"And when was the last time that happened?" Steve asked, rolling onto his side and giving up the pretense of sleeping himself out in Tony's rented, too-soft bed. 

It wasn’t as if Tony had been making all that much noise, but Steve had spent six months falling back into the patterns of his wartime habits. Sleep was a light and wary thing for him now, snatched wherever he had the luxury of someone trusted to take the watch, but even then he rarely surrendered to it fully. The subtle shifts of the mattress beside him as Tony worked, the wakeful meter of his breathing, the quiet tap of fingertip to glass, and even the tiny hums of concentration he gave were no easier for Steve to sleep through than an explosion, or Sam's snoring.

Tony pretended to think about the answer. "1985," he decided at last, fingers dancing over the screen. "First and only time I tried ‘shrooms."

"Bad trip?" Steve guessed.

"Great trip," Tony corrected with a grimace. "An entire day of uncomplicated happiness. I laid on the roof of Sloan labs and watched the sky change colors all day. Pure, idiotic bliss for twelve hours, during which I did not solve world hunger, cold fusion, or even the cabling system for my bridge design project that was due the next day. Sheer hell, I tell you. The model of my bridge only exceeded its expected load capacity by 59% instead of doubling it."

"Mm. Yours is a hard lot," Steve deadpanned, then stifled a yawn. "So what's the big idea this time?"

"Sci Fi conventions," Tony grinned, flipping the tablet so Steve could see. 

There was a literal hoard of fans in Avengers costumes gathered on the steps of some hotel. The costumes ranged from pretty darned accurate, through barely trying but having fun anyhow, and onward to 'do you understand what combat gear is actually for?' and 'you look very cold right now.' Steve counted about twenty variations of the Captain America suits he'd worn over the decades, then upped that number to twenty five when he realized that all the kids in top hats and bustle dresses were supposed to be Avengers too. 

"Wow," Steve blinked, just noticing a petite girl who looked eerily like Steve's pre-serum self. She carried a garbage can lid, and had made herself up with a fat lip and black eye just to carry the theme. "That's... really..."

"I know, right?" Tony grinned, taking the tablet back. "I look pretty hot as a chick, but I have to say, building bra cups into a breastplate is just asking for a cracked sternum. I mean one solid body hit, and she'll be..."

"In a world of hurt, since it says that armor's made out of plastic," Steve interrupted, hefting himself up and leaning a little into Tony’s space -- testing to see if the welcome he’d enjoyed the previous night had expired yet. "Why are we looking at this instead of sleeping?"

"HYDRA," Tony answered, pressing right back into his shoulder without hesitation. "Fans. Recruitment hotbed." Steve gave him a skeptical look, and Tony rose to it at once. "Seriously, have you been to one of these? Have you met some of these fans? They're smart kids. A lot of them have social problems, but they're creative, well grounded in the sciences usually, and completely alienated from their age peers. They’re desperate to feel accepted and valued, Cap, and we both know what kind of stupid ideas you can let yourself get talked into when you feel like that.” Steve frowned at the unsubtle slight to Dr. Erskine, but had to allow that as true. 

“HYDRA wouldn't have to even identify itself to get them on board,” Tony rolled onward, eagerly. “They could just say they're a political organization that's trying to save the world, and they need you, young Ray Jones and Jenny Smith,” he picked two chin-thrust faces from the photo, “yes you personally, to make it happen. Give kids like this a chance to be the in crowd instead of the outsiders, and before they'd know it, they'd be too far in to get out again." He looked down at his screen again, chewing his lip before adding, "Course, the other half of these kids would probably join in a flash if it meant they could have a ray gun of their very own."

Steve shook his head and sat back against the headboard. "That's not HYDRA," he said.

"They totally do have ray guns," Tony protested. "I read it on the internet!"

"Yeah, and I verified that in person last month," Steve agreed, rubbing absently at a burn scar over his hip that had yet to fully fade. "But I'm talking about HYDRA's basic M.O. here. They don't think like this; like innovators." He leaned over to tap his finger at the screen, enlarging it over a row of Black Widows and Widowers, interspersed with Falcons of various sizes and genders. "They were a parasite on the Nazis before they were a parasite on SHIELD, and their basic game plan hasn't changed: they don't want young, rough talent that they have to school and shepherd to their full potential, they want the best, either subverted to their cause, or somehow forced to serve it anyway. Like that movie, the one with the archaeologist and the snakes and the really dumb Nazis..."

"Raiders of the Lost Ark?" Tony prompted, clearly delighted at the idea that Steve had seen a modern film.

"Yeah, that one. The French fella put it about right, I figure; 'There is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.' HYDRA doesn't like to do its own heavy lifting. Not when they can steal someone else's work." He peered at the screen, wondering who the dark haired archer girl in lavender was supposed to be.

"Huh," Tony mused, scrolling over to where the three Hulks were having an emphatic game of Rock, Paper, Scissors with a cowed looking Dr. Banner. "That's really... that's just stupid."

Steve shrugged. "It's worked for them thus far."

"No, but I mean it's _moronic_!" Tony warmed to his topic, setting his tablet down so his hands would be free to flap in the air. "It’s unsustainable! You don't get decent work out of people who're being coerced, especially in the hard sciences. If you don't make your workers happy, you get bad data, shitty product performance, high personnel turnover, and a market share that you can't keep afloat without offshoring to sweatshops."

"Oddly enough, one time I happened to find the survivors of the 107th in a HYDRA sweatshop," Steve observed grimly, "And as for personnel turnover, it's hard to quit your job when you know they've got your family in the crosshairs."

Tony's face folded inward as if he'd caught a whiff of something foul. "Incentive program," he muttered savagely, and tapped the photo back to its previous size. The cluster of Iron Men (and Women) were a splash of scarlet and gold in the center, palms out, LED repulsors lit, and Steve found himself smiling.

"You wanted an excuse to crash this GriffinCon thing in your armor, didn't you?"

Tony's froze for all of half a second, then rallied into full on derision. “What? No! Of course I don’t -- No. Just no. No way have I got time for this kind of -” He snatched up the tablet again, flipping screens over to some kind of schedule on the same website. “Look, they don’t even have a solid science track in their programming! Why would I pay good money to- no, you quit grinning at me! The armor is not a publicity stunt, and I would never-”

“StarkExpo!” Steve coughed into his hand, and didn’t bother to conceal his amusement when Tony’s equivocations stalled into a fuming glare.

“You suck,” Tony declared, setting the tablet safely aside and grabbing one of the pillows with a glare.

“As verified last night,” Steve replied, then gamely batted the fluffy projectile away and tacked Tony to exact his revenge. He spent a few enjoyable minutes exploring Tony Stark’s library of dirty wrestling tricks and even dirtier insults (in at least three languages,) before the genius finally tapped out with a groan of despair.

“How are you not even ticklish?” Tony gulped, flattening his hands against Steve’s ribs as he let his head fall back to the mattress. “I distinctly remember you being really sensitive right there!”

“You learn to control that reflex when you grow up with asthma,” Steve promised, dropping a victory peck square onto Stark’s nose just to watch him try (and fail) to dodge it.

"Don't you have, like, laps to run or something?" Tony grumbled, scrubbing at his nose as if Steve had left a stain there before combing both hands through his hair. The rumpled flush in his olive skin just made Steve want to ruffle his hair up backwards as soon as he'd finished smoothing it down. 

Well, it had been a night of foolish indulgence already, hadn't it? Why stop now?

Tony spat like a cat as he dodged away from Steve’s head-rub, and Steve didn't even bother not to laugh at him. "Kind of had to get out of the jogging habit while Sam and me were on the road on the road," he admitted, settling back to watch Tony put his hair in order. He'd missed it of course, the running, but while Steve was prepared to be reckless when a good cause was in the wind, he had to draw the line at suicidally stupid -- he really wasn't prepared to give some HYDRA sniper the chance to pick him off in his sweats and track shirt. That would have been just embarrassing.

Tony eyed him for a long moment, something warm underneath the scowl he wasn't ready to let go yet. Then he huffed and reclaimed his tablet. "Yeah, well I'm guessing you got your workout pretty regularly anyhow, from the string of HYDRA installations you left burning behind you. Hill's probably gonna want to pick your brain on that when you come in, by the way. Some of those weren't even on our radar until you guys blew them up."

"Only about half of those were even our fault." Steve chose to say it with a grin, shoving the sense memory of boiling rage, ozone, brass and cordite, and sinking futility at having missed the mark yet _again_ , forcibly aside. "Bucky was going down the same list we were, and in just about the same order, it turned out." He sat up, scratched at a still-sticky spot on his belly, and sighed into a stretch. "Anyhow, who says I'm coming in? I might just be hanging around for the...” he waggled his eyebrows and leered like Dugan in a brothel, “ company."

Tony cut him a look, sidelong and unimpressed, then shook his head. "Nope. Not buying if that’s what you're selling, Cap. You're not that much of a player. And if there's one thing I know about Steve Rogers, in or out of that spangly uniform, it's that he doesn't back down from a challenge."

Steve pursed his lips and rolled back to examine the ceiling with an unforgiving eye. "HYDRA isn't a challenge, Tony, it's more like a damned chore."

"Only because we haven't got out ahead of them yet," Tony promised, slithering down to sprawl over Steve's chest, one arm along the collarbone to brace his weight while the other tucked the tablet farther out of harm's way. "We're never gonna get at the roots of the problem if we let them keep us distracted with mopping up the blood and rubble. And that," he poked Steve gently in the nose, "is why I know you're on board. Because the strategist in you knows we can't just keep cutting off heads. We need you to help us find the beating heart." He smirked, a strangely fond expression, for all its sass. "And you're all about heart, aren't you?"

“Well...” Steve drawled as he folded his arms around Tony’s chest and rolled over on top of him, legs spread just enough to trap Tony’s between them, weight braced on his elbows to keep their chests only just grazing skin to skin with the rhythm of their breaths, but hips firmly pressed together, “I wouldn’t say I’m _all_ heart....”

Tony laughed, prick hardening gamely in the crook of Steve’s hip as he rutted up into his weight. “Oh, you wanna go again, big guy?” he leered, “Well bring it. I can take you. Again.”

“That,” Steve grinned into a kiss, “was what I was hoping you’d say...”

***

Steve woke next to sunlight on his face; broad, warm and golden as syrup as it caressed the sleep from his brain, and drew him to wakefulness like the most patient of lovers -- drew him softly into drowsy, easy comfort the like of which he’d rarely known in his entire life. Nothing hurt, nothing ached, nothing stank, or was wet or cold or dripping or ticking or making tiny, furtive, sneaking sounds. Nothing pressed itself through that curtain of soft, hazy gold to demand his quick attention or response. For once, it was just... easy.

He lay on his side, body heavy and lax in the soft hollow of the oversized bed, two of the feather pillows wadded exactly so beneath his neck and cheek, linens lying cool and easy over his skin. No ache of clenched teeth or fists in the night; no welter of knotted sheets and sweaty distress to lurch up from, only the calm, golden swell of waking, and Tony Stark against his back, gamely doing his best to be the Big Spoon. 

Shallow snores warmed the skin between Steve’s shoulders, a beard tickled his spine, one hand draped over his ribs, and callused fingertips just rested against the flex and swell of Steve’s belly as he breathed slowly in, and slowly out, and finally allowed himself to wonder just what the hell it was he thought he was doing.

Tony Stark. He’d slept with Tony Stark -- that was clearly the place to begin. He’d put his foot right into that irreverent rubicon, even knowing the delicacy of the relationship between them, and how easy it was for either one of them to switch the grip from olive branch to cudgel with little more than a careless word, and Steve had just gone and... gone there. Twice. 

Though depending on how you counted it...

_Jesus, Rogers. What were you thinking?_

He took a deep breath, filled his lungs until his ribs creaked, and the angled weight of his arm made Tony’s fingers twitch against his chest. He hadn’t been thinking last night -- had actually decided not to do any thinking right about the time Tony had climbed into his lap and made his offer plain. It had been the _thinking_ that had ground him down, out there on his hunt for HYDRA’s scattered remains -- the thinking that never stopped, waking or sleeping; the thinking about what had he missed, what didn’t he know, who was lying to him this time? Sam’s dislocating his arm and needing time at home to heal had been the closest thing to a saving grace Steve had seen since the helicarrier, and he wasn’t too proud to admit it.

But it didn’t make that _thinking_ habit any easier to shake off. So he had decided not to do it last night -- had decided to roll with his gut’s say-so and leave his squirrelly brain and its budding paranoia habit out of the voting process altogether. Which meant, when you got right down to it, that Steve still wasn’t sure _why_ he’d done it. Tony’s invitation... well, Steve had turned down more insistent overtures before, from people he’d gotten along with better too. It wasn’t as if he was desperate just because Peggy had left him to history and Bucky was... He closed his eyes against the inevitable flash of pain.

Comfort. That’s what Tony had said it was all about. And in the broad, soft gold of the morning, Steve was hard pressed to find a better answer. 

Comfort offered freely to a man who hadn’t let himself take much of the like for a very long time; the comfort of skin on skin in a caress rather than a blow; the comfort of lingering gentleness to a body that had maybe forgotten what slow and gentle felt like in all those long frozen years; the comfort of resting -- really sleeping with another trusted ally close by, their breath stroking, damp and hot and regular against his skin in the dark so he knew he wasn’t all on his own in the night; the comfort of taking, and giving pleasure purely because, for just a little while, everything wouldn’t _hurt_ anymore. Comfort; for as long as it was gonna last.

And it wasn’t like Tony wanted anything from him, anyhow -- not beyond the sales pitch he’d led with at the diner last night. There was no leverage here, and Steve didn’t know the man as well as maybe he should have before tumbling into bed with him, but he was pretty sure that using sex to buy people’s cooperation in his schemes wasn’t really Stark’s style. He was dead certain it _wasn’t_ Ms. Po -- Pepper’s style anyhow. She had class for miles, that one, and if she caught wind of her man-

As if on cue, Tony shifted in his sleep, groped haphazardly at Steve’s chest, and broke wind so vigorously the sheets fluttered around them.

“Ugh. Good one, Tony,” Steve chuckled, slithering out of the bed and making for the bathroom before he had to discover for himself if that discharge had been loaded, or just sound and fury. A joke about Starks never firing blanks tickled at the ribald. campfire-edge of his mind, but Steve resolutely let it go unexamined as he pulled the bathroom door shut behind him and flipped the lights on.

Tony’s phone lay on the bathroom vanity, between a neat little leather traveling case, and a towering pile of machinery which it didn’t take a genius to realize was probably the big angry brother of the jamming app Tony had coupled to his phone last night. Steve tapped the phone awake, and found himself a little surprised at the time displayed. 6:33. 

Later than he usually slept, sure, but still plenty early enough to get a run in before the day got too hot. And if he hustled a bit, he might even get to Sam for his morning PT before he started to worry. Steve really _had_ missed running while searching for Bucky’d had him on the road, and when he’d bought the condo upstairs from Sam’s, it had been with the full intention of making good on his promise to not let the man’s injury put him too far out of fighting trim while he healed up from it. You could start slow with running, go easy on level roads, and take your time with it when nobody was shooting at you or trying to blow you up or capture you, or herd you into some kind of- 

No. Steve blew out the tension that had crept back into his jaw, and gave himself a hard shake. Just no. Tony. He was thinking about Tony, and what they’d done last night. And again this morning.

Smirk restored, Steve briefly inspected his chin (not too scruffy to wait till he got home for a shower and shave) and then took a reflexive check of his throat for any visible love bites. It took him a moment before he woke up enough to remember that the serum and the sexual revolution made that kind of thing a non-issue these days. Even if Tony had been twice the biter he’d turned out to be, any photographer would have to be right on the ball to catch Captain America with a hickey, and since nobody knew he’d been there last night, nobody would be looking.

“Nobody _cares_ , Rogers,” he told himself firmly before heading back into the bedroom to collect his rumpled clothes.

He hadn’t quite figured things out yet by the time he’d finished dressing, but the kittenish grumble Tony gave as he curled into the pillow under Steve’s waking jostle went a good way toward restoring his pleasant mood. “Mnooooo...” Tony whined, burrowing further when Steve blew in his ear. “M’not running with you. Sleeping. G’way.”

“Brought the wrong shoes for running,” Steve answered, oddly charmed by the hint that Tony wasn’t quite done with whatever it was they were doing either. “But I’m hungry, and I don’t feel like explaining to Sam why I’m showing up late and in last night’s clothes. So I’m gonna head out now.”

Tony curled down tighter around the pillow, groaned something about walking and shame, and waved a hand vaguely at the kitchenette, and the keys to the sleek little Audi he’d brought them there in. 

“Thanks, but I’m fine,” Steve grinned and gently ruffled the dark hair up into a roostertail just for the hell of it. “It’s only about 3 miles. Won’t take me long.” The next grumble was equally muffled, but definitely unflattering in tone, and was accompanied by Tony’s hand smashing his hair back down again, and yeah -- whatever else this thing between them was, however long it was going to last, it was at least comfortable. Steve decided right in that moment, that he was about ready for some comfortable after all he’d dragged himself through since leaving Brooklyn for the war. 

He leaned in close, kissed the back of Tony’s neck, and murmured, “I’ll talk to Sam about the consulting gig, give you a call later on to let you know what I decide, ok?” The hand waved vaguely, briefly at him as Steve headed for the door, then it flopped into the rumpled linens and was still.

Steve decided he’d better text Jarvis, just to be sure Tony remembered the exchange once he’d fought his way back to the living again. Last thing they needed was for hurt feelings and crossed wires to turn the whole thing on its ear in the mud. Might very well end up there anyhow, all things considered, but at least Steve could put a bit of effort into making sure things stayed relatively polite for now.

***

“Do people in this century even know how to make their own coffee anymore?” Steve mused disapprovingly when Sam finally fumbled open his front door and peered squinting into the early morning sunlight.

“I hate you so much right now,” Sam growled, ignoring the cup in Steve’s hand. “So much.” He hadn’t moved from the threshold, hadn’t opened the door any farther, and seemed to be trying to light Steve on fire with the power of his mind.

Steve grinned in reply to the implication that he was showing off his serum a bit too much, and toasted Sam’s glower with his half-drunk orange juice. “I mean it’s just coffee, right? But there was nearly a brawl over the soy milk down at the Starbucks on Spring,” he went on. “I really thought those Congressional interns were going to smash some bottles and start swinging for the fences at any moment.”

“Really, man. Utter loathing.” Sam shoved the door aside and leaned out to snatch the cup with his good hand. “You see this face? Because this is my hate face, and I’m wearing it just for your perky-ass self.”

“Aw now that’s gratitude for you,” Steve tried to pout as he followed Sam into his condo, but he didn’t try very hard. He hadn’t managed to keep a somber face for long at all after leaving Tony’s hotel room, but he didn’t much figure Sam would want to know anything about that. Not yet, at least. 

“And after I brought you breakfast, and a hot caramel milkshake with coffee in it, too,” he complained as Sam pried the lid away and leaned to sniff at the drink like a vintner appraising a new pressing.

“Takes more than a venti caramel macciato with whipped cream to buy off this hate face Rogers.” He sipped, then, “Oh my sweet baby Jesus thank you...”

“Why yes, as a matter of fact, I _did_ remember that you like an extra shot of espresso and salt on the top,” Steve chuckled, dropping the bag of bagels onto the counter and turning to root through Sam’s kitchen drawers for a bread knife. “Weirdo.”

“Mmmm...” Sam moaned, flopping into one of the bar stools and licking the whipped cream from his upper lip as if it held the secrets to eternal life. “Night you just put me through, I’mma need this caffiene and sugar,” he grumbled.

“Erm. Sorry?” Steve grimaced at the cutting board and hoped his neck wasn’t as red as his face suddenly felt. “I ...ah, didn’t think you’d notice.” 

“Oh, I noticed,” came Sam’s growl in reply. “I literally just got to sleep an hour ago. One measley hour, Rogers, and then here you come banging on my door looking all perky.”

Steve focused very hard on cutting the bagel evenly and not blushing. “Well, we’ve been back in DC for a week now, and nobody’s shot at me, tailed me, tranq darted me, or tried to shove me into a van,” he said, sliding the first bagel Sam’s way. “I’d say that’s cause for a fella being glad to see a morning as nice as this one.” Because modern world or not, Steve wasn’t quite prepared to tell his wingman just how he’d spent his long night away.

Sam didn’t seem to notice the evasion however. He just scowled and rooted in the Starbucks bag for cream cheese. “Maybe so,” he allowed, brandishing a butter knife, “But that don’t mean the downstairs neighbor that fella kept awake all night with his goddamned pacing has to share the enthusiasm!”

Steve froze. “Pacing?”

“All damned night,” Sam growled. “And yeah, I get you were tryin to be quiet about it and everything, but you and me, we are gonna _find_ that squeaky board in your floor this after _noon_...” he peered up then, rant evaporating into sudden concern. “Steve? Man, you ok?”

Steve didn’t nod, he didn’t breathe, didn’t twitch a muscle. But he listened, hoping so hard it felt like his chest would burst from the pressure of it.

“Hey man,” Sam said, one hand cupping lightly around Steve’s elbow in a gentle, grounding grip. “You know I get it. The nightmares fuck me up sometimes too, and I’da come up, only you didn’t answer when I texted you, so I figured you needed to handle it by yourself...”

The weight of Steve’s phone in his pocket -- the new one, the one Tony had given him last night -- was a sudden and guilty thing as Steve remembered tossing his own aside in the rush to get down to the lobby. Where Bucky hadn’t been anymore once he got there.

“Steve?” Sam asked, gentle, worried. 

And then something in the ceiling made a faint, shivering creak, and Steve bolted from the apartment, bread knife in hand, breakfast forgotten. He heard Sam curse around his name, heard the crash and scramble behind, but no pursuit followed him out to the building’s main stairwell, and when Steve closed in on his own apartment’s landing, he was facing it alone. 

The door was still ajar, but just barely. Powdered sheetrock dusted the carpet over the hole he’d made bashing the thing open last night. Nobody had stepped in the chalky mess. Nobody had drawn the door across to smudge those white specks it in the night.

_Buildings creak,_ he told the clench of reckless hope in his throat. _It was windy last night, wasn’t it?_

But he couldn’t remember. He’d been paying attention to Tony, not the weather. A flicker of brown in the stairwell drew Steve’s eye to Sam, taking position on his six. He had his gun in hand, silencer in place on the muzzle, and not a trace of sleep left in his eyes as he nodded Steve toward the door in the particular cadence they’d developed in their months on the hunt. The cadence that meant ‘we go on three... two...’

Steve snatched the door open on the imaginary ‘one’.

The Winter Soldier had him by the throat on the imaginary ‘go’.

Steve grabbed his jacket coat, hooked a knee, and shoved hard into Bucky’s weight, kicking up and over, out of his grip when Bucky toppled backwards into the foyer. Hands caught the back of Steve’s jacket, twisted tight and jerked, and instead of landing on his feet in the hallway, Steve crashed sidelong into the coat closet, splintering the door beneath his weight.

Then Bucky was astride him, both hands on his throat this time, eyes wide and wild as he hunched low and heaved Steve up between himself and Sam’s line of fire. He panted, half growling behind a rictus of teeth that badly needed brushing, his hair a matted tangle, beard a solid week from any kind of a razor. But there was recognition alongside the fury in Bucky’s shadowed eyes, and damned if Steve didn’t find that more of a comfort than the last time they’d been nose to nose. 

“Barnes, let him go!” Sam’s shout echoed in the stairwell, frantic and mad. “Steve, come on, man! We talked about this!” 

And yeah, they had. Steve had made Sam a solemn promise about trying harder not to fall, no matter who had pushed him.

“Stop it,” he told Bucky -- an order, not a plea. “Buck, you need to let me go.”

Bucky cursed back at him in Russian -- something about running or escape, too fast for Steve to parse out. Cold fingers whirred tighter on his neck as Steve pinched hard at the middle finger of Bucky’s flesh hand. He could yank it backward if he had to -- break the bone, dislocate the knuckle, and even the strongest throttling grip will fail. Natasha had taught him that one, but he really didn’t want to have to prove it out here.

“Bucky!” he gritted, pinching the knuckle, lifting it backward, “Let up!” 

And suddenly the Russian turned English, gutteral and furious. “Where did you go?”

“I _will_ shoot you, man,” Sam yelled from the doorway, his shadow a long sprawl on the hallway carpet, both hands bracing his weapon. “You got nowhere to dodge this time, and at this range, I will not miss.”

Bucky’s glare didn’t flicker at the threat. If anything, it sharpened, as if he could paralyze his prey with the force of it alone. Steve strained that middle finger back a little more, and made his refusal plain. “Buck, you need to stop it.”

“Tell me where!” Bucky said, hardly noticing as the clench of his flesh hand began to fail. “I couldn't _find_ you! Where did you-”

Sam gun thudded, put a bullet into the doorframe so close to Bucky’s head that dark hair fluttered, and not even the Winter Soldier could ignore the warning in that. Steve was ready the instant Bucky’s weight shifted, rolling, dragging, and kicking hard to launch the man away from him, out of his sheltering shadow and into the apartment.

When Steve gained his feet again, Bucky was just out of reach, a knife braced at arm’s length, as if the grenade in his other hand wasn’t deterrent enough. Everyone froze. There was only the sound of their breaths slicing the silence into sharp, angry shards until Bucky’s eyes focused on Steve again.

“Where?!” It was almost an animal noise, a yelping scream more than a word, but that metal thumb was pressed hard against the grenade’s trigger, and in the depth of his aching belly, Steve found he’d had enough.

He put his back to Sam, hands up, weight poised to move whichever way he must to catch that sleek metal sphere wherever it might be thrown. Bucky’s face folded deeper, snarl becoming grimace as he read the intention clear in Steve’s stance. His knife hand began to shake. 

“Quit it, Buck,” Steve barked, anger flattenning his accent, stripping away the Captain’s battlefield cool and carving a Brooklyn edge on the words. “I don’t wanna fight you again, but I ain’t gonna let you hurt Sam-”

“Seriously?” 

“ _Or me_ either!” Steve finished over Sam’s yelp. The pull in his belly -- the bullet wound from the hellicarrier that had taken the longest to heal -- made his breath a little shorter, his blood a little higher, his hands a bit more eager to screw down tight into fists. And after months of patience getting him nowhere with Bucky, Steve was just about done with it. “I ain'tcher mission this time, Asset,” he goaded.

Bucky flinched back at that, stumbling over the ruin of the coffee table. “Don't call me that!” he shouted, slashing the knife before him like it could cut that name out of the air.

“Then you quit actin’ like it!” Steve yelled back, eyeing the range between Sam, the grenade, the stairwell, and the living room window. “You don’t belong to HYDRA anymore, Bucky. They’re down-”

He jerked another step back voice thinning in his throat. “No they're not! Cut off one head-”

“Cut-off heads don’t matter right now,” Sam put in, far too close to that grenade’s blast range for Steve’s liking. “You free of them, man. You been free since the minute you dove into the river.”

Bucky shook his head, hard and manic. “ Nobody's free!”

“Well who’s orders you followin’ right now then, Bucky?” Steve shouted back, temper on the boil. “We blew the hell outta the last of those damned programming chairs in Newark last month! You were there! You dropped the sniper who shot at Sam during evac before it blew. So you damned well _know_ it’s gone.”

“No, you’re...” He swallowed, his eyes flicking to, and away from Steve’s gaze like he couldn’t not look, but couldn’t bear the gaze when he had it. “You don’t know what-” he faded farther into the apartment, as though Steve was shoving him back word by word, “You _can’t know_ -”

But Steve only followed him in, angry and aching, and not for one instant forgetting about that grenade. “HYDRA ain’t forcin’ you do anything anymore,” he growled, glass and wood crunching under his boots. “There's just you, and us, and this apartment right now, Buck. So you tell me: who’s orders are you carrying out?”

“He's right, man,” Sam voice was level, a cool, wary breath of sense in the shattered room. “Next move you make; next _choice_ you make, Barnes; that's on you, not anybody else. You're callin the shots now.” Then he released the hammer on his gun with slow, deliberate clicks, each one echoing through the naked room. “Maybe you oughta sit yourself down a minute and think about what it is that you want to happen next,” He said once the countdown ended.

Bucky looked sick, green and greasy with sweat, and Steve could see the panicked rage in his eyes cracking loose into something else, something bloody and nerve-raw in the morning air. He straightened just a little, swallowed hard to chase the fear/rage/hurt from his own throat, and summoned a gentler voice to ask, “What’s your mission now, Soldier?”

A breath of silence. Then two. 

And then Bucky dropped -- just folded to his knees with a thump and crunch, knife skittering off the hardwood at his side, grenade cradled in the crook of his lap. 

He made a sound then, halfway between a sob and a giggle. “It’s you, Stevie,” he said, peering up through the matted curtain of his hair as he thumbed the grenade’s trigger back to safety and rolled it to Steve’s feet like a toy. 

“You were always my mission.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hadn't wanted to post this until I was a bit farther ahead, but it's been a rough week, looks like it'll be a rough weekend too, and I could just use some comment love to inspire me onward to the next bit. So if you've got anything to tell me about this chapter, I'd love to hear your thoughts!


	4. Lagrange Point

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boundaries, bad timing, and the stable orbit between two gravity wells.

“I’m sorry, Captain. Mr. Stark is unavailable at the moment.”

“He’s still asleep, isn’t he?” Steve guessed, glancing at his watch. It was approaching ten, and Steve deeply wished he could be asleep too, after the night he’d had. But Sam was cooking breakfast in the kitchen with Bucky looking on warily from behind a pile of weapons on the table, and there was a part of Steve that just couldn’t get far enough past the shock of it all to even imagine himself ever sleeping again, even if his bed weren’t covered in upended boxes of clothing right now.

“He is, Captain, and may I tender my compliments for the achievement? Sir rarely sleeps well away from home without excessive alcohol to facilitate the process.”

“Aw Jeez...” Steve covered his face and told himself he wasn’t blushing. At all. Nor grinning at the memory of Tony as he’d left him; rumpled, ravaged, and tuckered out in bed.

“May I relay a message for you when he awakens?” Jarvis went on, unruffled.

“Um... yeah, tell him...” he paused, watching as Sam made a show of flipping a pancake in the air, and Bucky’s hand twitched toward his disassembled SIG sauer like he was suppressing the urge to shoot it down. “Tell him that there’s been a...” Steve leaned against the bedroom wall, taking care to stay in Bucky’s sightline while he dug for the words. 

_Tell him what?_ the voice in his mind heckled relentlessly. _Tell him ‘Thanks for the dance, but ha ha, funny story, that guy who’s been freezing me out all year just broke into my house and I can’t come work for you after all.’ Is that what you’re gonna tell him, Rogers?_

The kitchen light was brighter than it should have been, dangling out of the ceiling on its wires, glass removed, fixture unscrewed, and bulbs bare to the day. The unforgiving blaze turned Bucky’s eyes to the color of polished steel as they swept the apartment, and finding Steve, settled on him unblinking. _Tell him that my old lover just tried to kill me, but he didn’t try very hard, so I think I’m just gonna stay home and play house for awhile till he feels better?_

“Captain?”

Steve shook the whirling thoughts from his head and turned his shoulder to the hallway so his lips wouldn’t be quite so easy to read from the kitchen. Most of the boxes stacked in his bedroom were either upended on the bed, or standing open, their contents rumpled and thoroughly rifled in the search with which Bucky had filled up his anxious night. “Tell him,” Steve said, “That... something’s come up, and...” He stopped, blew out a frustrated sigh, and scrubbed his face with a weary hand. “You know what, I should just call him later.”

“Of course, Captain,” Jarvis answered, and cut the call without further dithering, for which Steve thought he might actually be eternally grateful.

“Who was on the phone?” Sam asked, entirely casual and plating pancakes as Steve wandered in for coffee a moment later.

There was a rustle behind him, a soft squeak of weight shifting in a too-new chair, and Steve put on one of his very best casual smiles to reply. “Answering machine. I never know what to tell those things.” He poured, then cast a look over his shoulder to ask, “Hey Buck, you still take your coffee the same way?”

Bucky blinked, looked suspicious at first, then puzzled, then worried, and finally annoyed. He folded both arms around his belly and shrugged, glowering.

“Black it is then,” Steve decided, forcibly cheerful as he pulled a second mug out of the open box beside the fridge. “You can decide for yourself if you want sugar.”

“Yeah, lemme just run downstairs,” Sam put in, coming around the island to set plates onto the table, “I used up the last of yours, so if Barnes wants milk, then-”

“He won’t-” Steve began, just as Bucky snarled, “No!” and shot to his feet.

There was a beat of silence, brittle and appalled, then, “He. Um. Bucky never liked milk,” Steve explained. “Before, I mean. Said it never agreed with his guts, and beer was cheaper anyway.”

He glanced at Bucky then, half a smile on his face, but it froze and blew away when it met the thunderous, vibrating tension pouring off Bucky’s scowl. It looked like he was hung halfway between the urge to flip the table over and run from the room, and the urge to find a dark corner and huddle down into it.

And worse, Steve could see him shut it all fiercely down the instant he spotted Steve’s reaction to it. He went from cornered animal to impassive robot in the space of a breath, and Steve’s heart wanted to shatter at the sight. But all he could do was watch it happen, and try to keep his mourning hidden inside as he stood there and contemplated never bringing up coffee again.

Then after another long, grisly silence, Sam pulled out his chair and sat down as if nothing had happened. “Okay then, dairy aversion duly noted,” he said, sweeping Bucky’s piled arsenal to the corner of the table so he could put down the forks and syrup in the middle. “ Now will you two sit the hell down and eat your damn breakfast before it gets cold please?”

To which Steve could think of no better response than to head to the table and set the mugs down and pretend it had always been his intention to take the long way around to get there.

***

“He’s not _still_ asleep, is he?” Steve asked, shaking out the towel he was folding with a snap. It was pushing noon, and between Bucky’s brittle, unhelpful silence, and Sam’s not-casual-at-all hovering around the apartment, Steve was just about ready to consider laundry and an excruciating conversation about commitment and feelings as an improvement on the day.

“No,” Jarvis answered from somewhere between curt and apologetic. “Mr. Stark is in transit, and has asked that his calls be held.”

“Oh.” The tight knot in Steve’s belly sank so fast it was in danger of leaving a mark on his shoes. “He’s heading back up to New York I guess then?” Which made sense, really. Jarvis would have played Steve’s stammering non-message back for Tony when he awoke, and what else would the genius have taken away from it than that Steve had changed his mind, and wasn’t interested in Tony’s invitation? And he did have a company to run, after all, so what would be the point in hanging about?

“I’m afraid for security reasons, I’m unable to discuss Mr. Stark’s itinerary with anyone outside of a very limited authorization list, Captain.”

“And I’m not on that list,” Steve sighed, setting the towel aside and reaching for a shirt. “And you probably can’t tell me when he’ll be available to take my call either, can you?”

“I’m sorry,” Jarvis said, and this time he sounded like it was true, “Predicting Sir’s movements outside the parameters of his workshop is a problem beyond even my algorhythms’ capacity. I can relay a message to him once he becomes available, of course, but...”

But Steve still hadn’t thought of a coherent way to put all that was happening in his home today into a nutshell, and the last thing he wanted to do was sour what was left of his relationship with Stark long distance and by proxy. “Probably not,” Steve allowed, tugging open his new dresser to put the shirts away. “Could you maybe ask him to call me when he’s got some time today though?” he asked, trying not to sound pitiful. “It’s just I’d...”

Something slid along the bottom of the drawer, a loose, lightly rolling clatter-and-drag of metal against wood, and finding nothing inside when he ducked to look, Steve went to his knees and pulled the whole drawer out. And there, wadded in between the floor of the compartment and the bottom of the drawer, he found a tangle of wires, plastic and metal shards, adhesive gel, and foam rubber; all the components tiny, all the devices smashed beyond recovery. At first glance, Steve figured there had to be the remains of at least a dozen listening devices crumpled into that shallow grave.

“Captain?” Jarvis prompted, and Steve let go his breath with a sigh. 

He reached into the opening, swept all the scraps and shards of his invaded privacy out onto the hardwood with the flat of his hand. “Just have him call me please,” he asked Jarvis, distantly impressed at the even, calm tone. 

Then he keyed off the call and went to find a dustpan.

***

“You... you just left.”

 

Steve kept his flinch internal, didn’t slosh the glass of iced tea he’d been about to set beside Bucky’s elbow, but it was a near thing. After six hours of stony, furious silence in the face of their coaxing questions and attempts at care and feeding, Steve hadn’t expected the first words the Winter Soldier surrendered to come out in such a lost, plaintive tone. 

He put the glass down beside the sandwich Bucky had been ignoring for an hour, and pulled out a seat for himself at the kitchen table. “Last night, you mean?” he asked.

Bucky actually glanced at the tea, but didn’t seem like he was ready to release the grip his hands had on each other to reach for it yet. “You just walked out,” he answered. “Unarmed. No backup. You didn’t even tell him where you were going.” He cut his gaze toward Sam, who was on a stepladder and reassembling one of the light fixtures in the living room. “Then...I couldn’t... There wasn’t any signal, and...” his voice dropped to an appalled sort of whisper. “And then you didn’t come _back_.”

There was a part of Steve that was cheering inside to hear proof that Bucky’d known him, had remembered him, had _cared_. 

But there was an older, angrier part of him that was more than ready to pick up the thread of a fight they’d been having since they’d been children, to knit it tight with the skein of worry, fear, and self-doubt he’d spun out of the last six futile months, and to scowl and shove and snarl ‘ _damn it, Bucky, who asked you to go and follow me anyhow?_ ’

Steve took a breath and dredged up about half a weary smile instead. “Can’t wrap me in flannel and keep me on the shelf, Buck-”

“It’s not SAFE, Steve!” Bucky lunged, catching Steve’s wrist as he started to sit back, and pinning it to the table. Then he froze, staring at the place where metal pressed flesh bloodless white against bone, as if he couldn’t figure out how he’d come to be there.

Steve stared at their hands too, utterly still as he waited for his heartbeat to calm, focusing all his attention on the finest of details so he could ignore the instinct screaming at him to yank free and brace to deflect a following blow that he knew would not be coming, because if Bucky had wanted to hit him, he’d have swung the instant he had Steve in range, and he hadn’t, over and over again that morning, he hadn’t, so there was no reason for Steve’s shoulders to be thrumming with barely restrained tension, and his jaw locked up, teeth clenched hard, heart slamming his ribs, breath stalled like a fist in his throat. No reason at all.

Steve breathed in until he shook to hold it, and made his fist relax. 

The knuckles of Bucky’s metal hand had gotten pretty badly scraped up since May. Whatever Bucky had been doing had worn roughly on the arm as a whole, tinting the once-flawless finish with cloudy heat haloes and scorch marks, gouges and scratches. The crimson star had been diligently scoured and scraped to a blurry smear of paint, but aside from that, the hand had taken the worst punishment. That was hardly a surprise -- give a desperate man a weapon like that one, and you couldn’t be shocked when he preferred it to all others. 

It was warm, that metal grip, bordering on hot where it bound Steve’s skin tight against his bones, and he imagined he could feel a tremble, fine as a humming string through that unforgiving span. It was probably him, if the motion was there at all, Steve realized. Then he made himself clap his free hand over the back of Bucky’s scuffed, scarred knuckles as if he’d never had to think twice about it -- a casual, brotherly move that fooled neither of them.

“Living ain’t safe, Buck,” he said, and his voice didn’t shake at all. “They say everyone who tries it winds up dead.”

The joke fell flat, cracked and scattered on the ice of Bucky’s glare. For a moment, the metal hand clenched, and Steve’s did too -- a warning, a test, a momentary loss of balance on both their parts. But it was over before Steve could give a warning word. Bucky snarled a curse in Russian, yanked free, and shoved to his feet. His chair toppled onto the hardwood as he stormed off to the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. 

Steve sat right where he was and let him go. He closed his eyes, blew out a frustrated breath that felt three times bigger than he was, and let himself slump in the chair’s embrace. 

He heard Sam climb down the ladder, then cross the room, his footsteps steady over angry, thudding racket Bucky was making in the bathroom. He heard the flick of the light switch, and a new yellow brightness washed across his closed eyes from the left. Then Sam was righting the chair and sitting down at Steve’s brand new table as if the only thing they had to discuss was rumors of HYDRA, or whose turn it was to make the breakfast run.

“So this seems like the time when I express my reservations about any of this ending well,” Sam observed casually.

“Seems like it,” Steve sighed, cracking an eye in time to watch Sam help himself to Bucky’s untouched lunch. 

“Every light fixture in the place is disassembled,” Sam said, chewing. “Every switchplate and electrical outlet pulled open too. Phone’s in pieces. You know he even took your TV remotes apart?”

“Looking for bugs,” Steve agreed, picking up the other half of the sandwich and taking a bite. No point letting good food go to waste. “Ears everywhere. Oh...” Steve sat up straight and fished the new phone out of his pocket, setting it on the table and activating the silencing mode with three taps. Sam’s eyebrows went up as the shushing Iron Man figure appeared, and then they went up higher when the conspicuous hush descended around them. 

“I met up with Stark last night,” Steve explained, too drained now to muster embarassment. “It’s a jammer. Must work pretty well, considering...” he tipped a nod at the closed bathroom door, where through the noise canceling field, he could faintly hear the shower rumbling to life.

“So you think that outburst is a sign he’s planning to stay?” Sam asked, brows knit low as he followed the direction of Steve’s gaze. “Now that his surveillance op on you seems to be busted?”

Steve had to shake his head. “How the hell would I know? Maybe he’s just here for the socks and razors again.” It hurt, saying it out loud, giving in to the doubt and discouragement he’d fought so staunchly against while they were in the field. But in a way it was a relief too; like finally vomiting up bad food after hours of wretched nausea. He finished the last of the sandwich in two determined bites.

Sam shrugged and took another bite of his own. “Just seems like you’d know what was on Barnes’ mind if anybody would.”

“Why?” Steve gritted, “because I know him? Because he’s my... because we were...” he shook his head and grabbed the glass of tea to try and wash the dry lump of food and irony out of his throat. “Sam, the Bucky I knew wouldn’t have done this.” he opened his arm, swept the apartment in a gesture. “He wouldn’t have jumped me blind, no matter now pissed off he was at me, and he _damn_ sure would _never_ have put me between him and a loaded gun!” He set the glass back down, carefully. “He ain’t just the Winter Soldier anymore, but that don’t mean I got his number.”

Though of course in the deepest, most painfully ironic of ways, Steve did. He’d had Bucky’s tags on him when he’d put the _Valkyrie_ into the ice, tucked under his uniform, held tight to his skin with straps and armored leather, just above where his stubborn heart wouldn’t quit beating. Those tags had still been with him when he’d been thawed, and once Fury’s welcoming charade was over, they’d been returned to him without comment, tucked into the velvet box of a discreet little heroic service award in James Buchanan Barnes’ name. Steve could have gone to his room, fetched that battered flake of tin and read Bucky’s service number out to Sam, and it would’ve provided just as much clarity to the man’s current motives as anything Steve could have told him about times past.

“But he’s still Bucky, right?”

_It’s you, Stevie. You were always my mission._

Steve deflated a little, slumping around the tense knot of pain where that third bullet had punched him hollow. Hope. That’s what that tugging, relentless ache felt like: hope that didn’t know when the hell to lay down and die. Hope like the kind that had dragged him to five different recruitment centers, through boot camp, the humiliation of two hundred USO shows, and finally, out of a plane over the Austrian alps just in case there was a chance he could be with Bucky when it really counted.

Steve swallowed hard. “He’s the man he had to become in order to survive what they did to him, Sam. You saw the file, and I know you read the notes. That kind of torture...” Steve shook his head, and dragged himself away from those tar-pit thoughts. 

“But... yeah, he’s still Bucky too. The part that always wanted to wrap me in cotton wool, anyhow.” He shook his head, scattered memories of a metal grip clenched around his throat into memories of soft lips and stolen kisses, and told himself it wasn’t time to sort the pieces. “But that’s about all the inside line I can give you right now.”

Sam sat back in his chair and nudged the glass of tea at Steve. “Okay.”

”...Okay?”

“Okay,” Sam agreed, briskly certain. “I just needed to hear you say that and make me believe it -- which you did, by the way,” he added when Steve didn’t quite manage to suppress his snort of annoyance at yet another goddamned test.

“Look, man, I’m just saying that neither one of us is in a good place to do this right now. Or at all, really,” he raised a hand to cut off Steve’s protest. “Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t help him, okay? I mean what the hell else are we gonna do? DC would be the logical place to look in the States for a psychiatric trauma specialist with a focus in brainwashed, tortured, amnesiac assassins, but...”

“But if we found any, they’d just turn out to be HYDRA anyway,” Steve agreed, exhausted at the very idea. The depth of background research it’d take to even figure out if he’d be safe so much as mentioning Bucky outside a bare handful of people was staggering. The more so without any of SHIELD’s resources to pull from.

“Right,” Sam said, watching Steve with sharp eyes as he picked up stray sesame seeds on his fingertip. “And with HYDRA still out there, we sure as hell can’t kick him out and expect it to end well. So I get there aren’t really any choices here. I’m just saying you’re not okay,” he pointed at Steve, “and I’m not okay,” he pointed at himself, and licked the seeds off his finger, and then nodded at the still-closed bathroom, “and HE’s sure as fuck not okay, and we got to all be aware of that going forward, or else somebody’s gonna get a bloody nose and go home cryin.”

And Steve couldn’t help but laugh at that one. The number of times he and Bucky both had trailed home with bloody noses and worse in their day, before the war and during... Between Steve’s righteous, back-alley brawls and Bucky’s dance hall dust-ups with jealous boyfriends, it was a rare week when one or the other of them wasn’t sporting some damage in plain view. 

Sam pushed the plate away, braced his elbows on the table, and leaned in, face settling into the lines of serious planning. “So now we figure out how the hell we’re gonna manage to stay on this tiger that’s worked his way under us.” He cut a glare at Steve and warned, “And don’t even with the socks and razors bullshit. Dude didn’t have to be here when you walked in, and we both know he’s got a lot more fight in him than he unpacked earlier. He came here for a reason, he stayed here for a reason, and he ain’t left yet for a reason.”

“And until I know what that reason is, he’s got all the power,” Steve mused, humor and nostalgia evaporating in a weary rush that made him suddenly, inescapably aware that he was very underslept, and not likely to get a nap anytime soon.

Sam’s smile pulled to one side, the way it always did when he thought Steve was being oblivious or quaint. “I wouldn’t say that. You got a knack for making people want to do things your way.”

“Oh, well,” Steve said, rolling his eyes as he plucked up the plate and glass and took it to the sink. “HYDRA had better watch out, or I’ll have to stare disapprovingly at them.”

“Naw, don’t you disrespect that stare,” Sam protested, still laughing. “My Nana had a stare like that, and believe me, she didn’t often need a yardstick to back it up. Woman kept order over four kids, twenty three grandkids, two husbands, a church choir, about a thousand potluck Sundays with nothing but that stare, and the power of her peach cobbler.”

“Well, I don’t bake,” Steve said, setting the plate in the sink and the glass beside it so that it looked less lonely. “Guess I’ll have to fall back on the super serum and hope for the best.” He tried to make it a joke, to smile around the words that were welling up from the lost, confused, uncertain but _hopeful_ pull in his belly, but the softly worried look on Sam’s face when he turned back to the table let him know he hadn’t really pulled it off.

“Hey,” Sam said, and waited until Steve met his gaze before offering, “He came _back,_ Steve. Whatever else is going on, he came to _you._ That has to mean something, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. The switchplate for the kitchen light lay face down on the island, two tiny screws nestled in one of its plastic grooves, and Steve was pretty sure he didn’t own a screwdriver small enough to put them back where they belonged. “I guess it does.”

“So what did Stark want?” Sam asked after a long and awkward moment of silence.

Steve followed his glance toward the phone still resting at Sam’s elbow, and cut himself a smile -- a soft, startled thing that was surprisingly warm against the tight-bitten stress he’d been holding in his jaw since Bucky’s violent surrender. “Me, apparently,” he said, and had to laugh at the startled twitch of Sam’s eyebrows. “Well, both of us, technically, since he said you’re invited to play in, but-”

“Whoa now,” Sam cut in. “He knows I don’t play like that, right? I mean I love you like a brother, and Iron Man’s the shit, but I’m just not into-”

“But _you_ are a pararescue with field medicine experience, and you racked up a pretty impressive headcount against HYDRA this year before you got winged,” Steve interrupted in turn. “And Tony Stark recognizes quality operatives when he spots them.”

“Ah. Per evidence of Ms. Pepper Potts,” Sam agreed, catching wise to the obvious, and letting the ruder line of questioning, along with any curiousity as to what Steve might have been doing with Stark all night, drop. “So he’s getting the old band back together then?”

“Something like that-” Steve began, then froze as the shower, barely more than a shadow of static through the silencing field, shut off. Sam followed the direction of Steve’s wary glance, and apparently caught on at once. 

He nudged the phone toward Steve with one finger, and nodded toward the bathroom door. “Think he’ll fit in your workout clothes?” he asked as Steve keyed the phone’s silencing function off.

“I hope so,” Steve answered as he stood. “His could really use a good washing, and -” 

The bathroom door opened in a billow of steam, and Bucky prowled out, naked and dripping and unconcerned with either. His chin was shaved clean and his wet hair scraped back from his face as if held there with too much pomade. _’He should look so much more like Before,’_ Steve thought, waiting for the sorrow to hit. Even with the scars, the metal arm, the hollowed cheeks and exhaustion shadowing his eyes, those few changes had banished the Winter Soldier from his face and frame... 

But there was no trace of a smile around his mouth, or in his eyes as he returned Steve’s stare without a word -- not a shadow, not a quirk, not a memory. Even when Steve dragged Bucky off Zola’s torture table, the first thing he’d done was smile. 

That thought did it at last -- Steve’s heart gave up the expected squeeze of grief, not so much for the recognition of his lost love, but for the want of it.

Bucky stared back, still and inscrutable as ice, but for the flickering motion of his eyes over Steve’s face, searching... or maybe just assessing, Steve couldn’t tell with nothing to go by but that single wrinkle between his lowered brows. Then, with eerie slowness, he squared on Steve and came forward, closing the distance between them with halting steps as something like determination settled in his eyes.

Steve stood still, breathed deeply and steadily against the churning of his stupid, too-hopeful heart, and tried to tell himself he was expecting nothing. The fiction held right up until Bucky drew up in front of him and raised his right arm -- slowly, so carefully, as if trying not to spook a wild or dangerous animal. He brushed a gentle knuckle across the corner of Steve’s mouth, (there had been torn skin there before, bloody and throbbing. The scar from the stitches had lasted nearly a month, and had hurt whenever he’d smiled.) and a few breadcrumbs fell tickling away.

 _Sheesh. Can’t take you anywhere, can I punk?_ A ghost whispered in his ear, and Steve felt that corner of his mouth tick upward unbidden. 

The past ached, the future loomed, but in the fragile, breathless present, Bucky’s thumb was tracing the arc of Steve’s helpless lips while his own curled up in jerky tics, as if they couldn’t help but mimic, and there; there Bucky was at last. And there was nothing Steve could do to tell his stupid, hopeful heart to calm down about it, or to stop his own foolish smile from spreading, wide and helpless across his face.

“I...” The wrinkle reappeared as Bucky licked his lips, visibly hunting for words. “I will fight you. No. I will fight _with_ you,” he said, searching Steve’s eyes with a wariness in his own. “This operation. This base,” he cast a meaning glance around the room Steve hadn’t had time to think of as ‘home’ yet. “I... want to stay?”

“Course you can stay, Bucky,” Steve choked out, not even a little ashamed of his welling eyes. “Just shine my shoes, maybe take out the trash once in awhile.”

Sam made a choked sort of snickering noise from the table, but Steve couldn’t even be bothered to flick a rude gesture his way, because that tiny, almost-smile had returned, and this time it made it to Bucky’s eyes.

“I can do that,” he said, and Steve couldn’t help but believe him.

***

He hadn’t meant to do it -- not in the foreward, reasonable, rational part of his mind, anyhow, but somehow between handing Bucky over to Sam for outfitting, and offering to amend the sad-bachelor state of his kitchen with a supply run while the pizza was en route, he found himself back outside the hotel, staring in confusion at the sleek little grey sports car Tony had squired them about in last night. It was even in the same parking spot Tony had left it in -- slightly angled, but still within the lines

Steve frowned and pulled out his phone. “Jarvis?”

The screen lit up at once. “Yes, Captain?”

“If I were to ask you where Tony was right now, you’d say you’re not authorized to tell me, wouldn’t you?” He circled the car, noting the vanity plates, ( _Avgr01_ ) the bumper stickers, ( _I <3 Avengers_ and _WWCAD_ ), an ornamental Iron Man figurine dangling from the rearview mirror, and no sign of any luggage in the car at all.

“I’m afraid so, Captain,” Jarvis replied, soundly oddly perky about the admission. “I am only authorized to disclose data regarding Mr. Stark’s condition and location to-”

“Would you please place a call to Ms. Potts for me then?” Steve interrupted, a little steamed. If Tony and his computerized butler both wanted to play games, then Steve wasn’t above playing a little on the dirty side to get a fair answer to a reasonable question.

“Ms. Potts, Captain?” Jarvis went from sly to chagrined in three words.

“I realize it’s dinnertime, but she tends to work late when Tony’s not in town, doesn’t she?”

“Ms. Potts does tend to-”

“Then go on and put the call through then,” Steve grinned, scenting blood in the water. “Pepper seems to be the kinda gal who’ll share intel on why it is that Tony can’t seem to return any of my calls. We are on a first-name basis, after all.”

“Of course, Captain,” Jarvis sighed. “If I may connect an incoming call to your receiver, however?” And then he did so, pointedly not waiting for Steve’s go-ahead, and Steve found himself wincing as his ear filled up with a rushing, blustery static.

“What the hell?” he grumbled, pulling the phone away and looking for the volume control.

“What’s that, Jarv?” Tony’s voice came back, pitched over the roar. “Got some sketchy signal there for a bit. Remind me to look into the interference from-”

“Stark, so help me, if you stonewalled me all day just to butt dial me now...” Steve growled.

“Steve?” The rushing static utterly failed to strip the eager note out of Tony’s voice. “I was literally just about to give you a call!”

“What a coincidence.”

“Where are you? I hear traffic, are you outside?”

“Outside your hotel,” Steve answered, crossing his arms over his chest as if he could seal that grudging annoyance in, hoard it in the face of Tony’s infectious enthusiasm as if it were valuable in some way. “I’m looking at your car right now. Where the heck are you?”

“About five hundred feet away, give or take,” Tony replied. “Your six, about 45 degrees. Stay put, I’m gonna bring you a thing.”

Steve turned and looked up, and even though he knew damned well what to expect, he felt the last dregs of his temper evaporate at the sight of Iron Man arrowing toward him out of the purpling evening sky. His faceplate was up, revealing Tony’s delighted grin, and his armor scattered water as he dropped to the asphalt, strode the last few clanking yards to Steve’s side. “Thought this new armor was supposed to still be on the drawing board,” Steve said, turning off his phone and tucking it into his pocket.

Tony preened, not a bit guilty. “Well, you're probably not the only one who thought that, but in my defense, it was an emergency situation, and I had to get the new prototype out in a rush.” He activates something that made the helmet separate itself at the joints and sort of slither away from his face and collapse on itself like a complicated sort of paper fan.

“Oh did you?” Steve smirked, stepping clear as the metal reformed itself into something that looked equal kin to a bobsled and a small sort of sarcophagus. “And what emergency was that? Because after the day I’ve had, I’m willing to say I’m qualified to judge where emergencies are concerned and -- uh.” He leaned back a little as Tony stooped and hoisted a dripping, muddy black satchel off the tarmac. “Oh. For me?”

“Yep!” Tony chirped, jiggling it by the straps until Steve took it off his hands. “That’s my emergency.”

“Pretty light for an emergency,” Steve answered, working at the wet knots holding the thing shut, and telling his stupid, hopeful fingers to stop shaking, because he hadn’t any right to hope that he might be holding onto...

“I really needed to be the one to fish it out of the river, Cap,” Tony said into the stunned, breathless silence once Steve tore the black fabric away and turned the old, familiar bevel of his shield to the light. “Couldn’t let anyone else get to it first.”

“You...” Steve swallowed hard, squeezed his eyes shut for a second, then tried again. “You found her.”

“Well yeah,” Tony scoffed, tucking his hands into his pockets and rocking back on his heels as if he couldn’t stay still for the life of him. “I told you I wasn't gonna leave proprietary Stark tech lying around for Hammer or Oscorp or AIM to pick up! It's irreplaceable!”

“Tony,” Steve began, but Tony was on a roll, apparently.

“Dad made that shield for you, Cap, and to be brutally honest, not only do I have no idea how he found that much vibranium, I haven't got the first idea how he alloyed it with adamantium and milled it into shape at all.” The hands were out of the pockets again, and weaving the air as if he had an array of his workshop holographs to help him explain himself. His eyes were bright in the long, low summer light, and the rosy flush across his face could have been exertion, enthusiasm, or pleasure. “Technically, that shouldn't even be _possible_ , but -- Oh...”

Steve caught Tony by the base of the skull with one hand and reeled him in to be thoroughly kissed. Right in the parking lot, where anyone at all might see.

“Oh,” Tony managed after a moment, smiling wide against Steve’s lips. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Steve whispered back, forehead tucked down against Tony’s as his hand found its familiar grip on the sodden, slightly slimy leather handgrips. “Thank you.”

“Yeah.” Tony said after kissing him again. “So I thought about painting it up, but figured that could wait, y'know?” He ran a reverent thumb along the shield’s edge and smiled down at it. “I’m betting it’ll work just fine without the true colours on it.”

“She always did,” Steve agreed.

***


End file.
